MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Holy smokes!

New Hampshire resident Josh Muszynski bought a pack of cigarettes at a local gas station for what he thought would be a few bucks but his bank account indicated he actually spent $23 quadrillion instead.

Expecting to see a few hundred dollars of charges when he logged online to check his debit account, Muszynski was amazed to see the 17-digit figure of $23,148,855,308,184,500.

"I thought my card had been compromised. I thought somebody had bought Europe with my credit card," Muszynski told WMUR-TV. "It was very concerning."

As it turns out, he wasn't the only one reeling from having a $23 quadrillion bill.

Across the country, several other Visa cardholders were charged $23 quadrillion for everyday purchases, including a Texas man who incurred the charge for a restaurant meal and another man in Memphis, Tenn., who was also charged $23 quadrillion for a pack of cigarettes.

Visa attributed the error to a glitch.

Hours after checking his account, Muszynski rushed back to the gas station but it appeared no one knew what to tell him. He wondered whether to call a debt relief company or how he'd pay it all off.

"The cashier says she couldn't help me at all. She didn't know anything about it," Muszynski said. "It's a lot of money in the negative, something I could never ever afford to pay back -- my children couldn't afford, grandchildren, nothing like that."

Muszynski called his bank about the string of numbers on the screen and a $15 overdraft fee the bank had tacked on to his mysterious debt. After two hours on the phone, Muszynski said, the representative on the line had no idea what to say.

"She just tried to assure me that everything would be fixed, and I couldn't see something like that being fixed," Muszynski said.

Nearly 24 hours after the hole formed in his bank account, Muszynski checked his statement again. The bank corrected his statement a day later.

"It was back to normal. They reversed the negative balance fee, which was nice," Muszynski said.

WMUR contacted Muszynski's bank about the statement mishap, but representatives said the card issuer, Visa, could only answer questions.

In a statement, Visa said the rogue charges impacted “fewer than 13,000 prepaid transactions” and resulted from a “temporary programming error at Visa Debit Processing Services… (which) caused some transactions to be inaccurately posted to a small number of Visa prepaid accounts.”