Visa cards hit by outage in Europe

Visa said on Friday that a “service disruption’’ hit its payment system in Europe, leaving some businesses unable to process purchases by its cardholders.

The extent and cause of the outage are unclear.

“We are currently experiencing a service disruption, which is preventing some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed,’’ the card giant said in a statement.

“We are investigating the cause and working as quickly as possible to resolve the situation.