That is capitalism for you. I saw a programme once where a firm bought in computers from other firms and just rebadged them all and sold them on with a mark up!
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They were using a flatbed (I think that’s the name) at the petrol station near me, for all transactions.
EDIT: Card imprinter is the name. Makes sense. 
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Related thread on Hacker News: Visa card network crashes, causing increased decline rates across UK and Europe | Hacker News
Some highlights:
It isn’t down.
I work for a large e-commerce company and we’re seeing ~10% decline rates, at most, on VISA cards only, and that’s intermittent at best. Overall average decline rate is more like 1-3% when you factor in the non-intermittentness of it.
Still not great, but not PAYMENT CHAOS and not a CRASH OF THE VISA NETWORK.
The plug to support The Guardian by donating with your VISA card at the bottom of an article about the VISA network being down caused me to laugh out loud. #Ironic
This is one of IBM’s flagship customers, isn’t it? They’re supposed to never go down.
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Sometimes value, sometimes service. Now when you sell to someone who knows what they are talking about they will know if they are getting value or not. As for the POS terminals and card processing tariffs most shops know nothing about it so can end up entering deals that are not the best for them.
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That is excellent 
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Just received a notification from Curve advising to not use a Visa card as the underlying card.
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At least we know where the TSB engineers ended up 
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It’s either back up or intermittent, just used a Visa card fine (I only remembered it was supposed to be down afterwards!)
The Hacker News post reports that on a big e-commerce site they’re only seeing about 10% of declines so doesn’t look too bad.
As someone who works at a legacy bank, this has been a nightmare — I’ve never been so pleased to finish a shift
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Is visa still down?
Apparently so
This is why I’m glad I have both visa and MasterCard
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I had to sneak my way past the wall of staff saying ‘cash only!’ to get in the supermarket to do my weekly shop. They’ve shut down all the ATMs too…
Local garage has a sign outside saying cash only too.
Most people don’t know the difference between mastercard and visa, so were somewhat surprised when my card worked 
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Shut down the ATMs or are they empty?
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I’ve never seen those ATMs empty and it’s only been a couple of hours… but it’s possible. They had a ‘not in service’ message up.
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We’d never cope in an actual emergency in this country 
Couple of hours with no Visa and it’s like the zombie apocalypse has come
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I suspect it’s mostly over too, but it’ll be a while before the shops dare risk it. Even a few % of shoppers unable to pay would cause chaos.
No but my visa debit card trousers are just fine…
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This is particularly annoying for supermarkets and I imagine it’s why some completely stopped accepting card payments even though it was largely intermittent. Having people plonk a huge shop on the conveyer only to find out that their card won’t work after several attempts is frustrating but also jams a till for quite a while. We ended up with quite a few layways in the fridge for people who were willing to try again in 30 mins. Or for people who were willing to take out cash at the ATM.
Interesting that Barclays said Apple Pay was working as several people tried this and although it went through on their phone/watches the terminal declined it but after a second attempt it went through. Of course, this lead to quite a few ‘ill be checking with my bank later’ quips.
I have to say most people were pretty understanding but there were a few people who got stupidly aggravated 
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was only 10% failure but and unwillingness to accept cards and the commotion it caused probably exaggerated it plenty.
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