The Visa Debit system is back up-and-running after an earlier fault. For a time this afternoon the bank cards would not work at ATMs or tillpoints across the country.

Both Permanent TSB (PTSB) and AIB say the issue has been fixed. An external Visa Debit outage is being blamed for the crash.

A Visa Europe spokesperson said  “Visa systems have been operating normally all day, servicing Visa debit, credit and prepaid transactions".

A survey back in January found that annual expenditure on Visa cards in Ireland reached €15.5 billion for the first time. This marked an increase of 17% on 2011.

According to the annual report from the company for the year ending September 30th, €1 in every €7 of consumer spending in Ireland was now on a Visa card.

There was also a 43% increase in the number of Visa cards - Debit, Credit and Prepaid - in Ireland last year.

This number increased to to 5 million in 2012.