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LONDON (Reuters) - Payments firm Visa Inc V.N said its systems are operating at "close to normal levels" and the earlier issue affecting users in Europe was "result of a hardware failure".

"We have no reason to believe this was associated with any unauthorized access or malicious event," Visa said in a statement. bit.ly/2J52vQS

Earlier in the day, Visa was experiencing a service disruption preventing some transactions in Europe being processed. This incident prevented some Visa transactions in Europe from being processed, the company earlier said in a statement.