passive income remedies

Guardian Money’s Miles Brignall has just returned from Morrisons supermarket in Letchworth. It’s cash only signs up. Plenty of shoppers have abandoned their baskets. Others are queuing up outside the ATMs outside the building.

Everyone’s pretty good natured considering. He says he was able to pay using a MasterCard and had no problems. Amex was also being taken but no visa cards.

Rebecca Rapport said:

My Visa debit was declined in M&S in the City at about 13:15 today. The sales assistant thought it was the card machine so I used Apple Pay. Sounds like this has been happening earlier than reported.

Rich Dunning, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who is currently working in the States with a colleague, had his card declined abroad.

We’re currently in the US for work and all our Visa work cards were declined, so it looks like the outage seems to be affecting cards being used outside Europe too. Luckily I had some dollars in cash from earlier and a colleague has a MasterCard so we’re not totally stuck!

Shoppers should “always carry two means of payment”, says one expert

Peter Hahn, the professor of banking at the London Institute of Banking and Finance, said consumers should be prepared for the possibility of “cyber risks” at all times by having backup payment options.

He told Sky News:

In today’s world, with cyber risks, everyone really needs to always be carrying two means to make a payment.

That almost means you should have two bank accounts. Cyber risks can happen really anywhere. Visa – we tend to think of it as a bank, but for most of us what it means is that it’s a communications network.

We have a bank that we’re going to have a credit card from, stores have their banks, and Visa is really the connection between those banks. And it’s got lots of entry points that can be challenged so hopefully they’ve got the expertise to fix those systems quickly