Mastercard users were having difficulty making payments and purchases online this morning. Down Detector users reported a large spike in issues with Mastercard in the US, UK, Japan, France and Australia just after 9am local time UK.
According to the online outage-monitoring website, over 100 users had their payments declined on Sunday morning, receiving an “error” message from the global tech company. Users took to social media to complain about the loss of services, with one person writing: “I’m trying to make a purchase on Amazon [but] I can’t because [the] payment keeps declining when there’s plenty of money in my account.” Another warned fellow Mastercard customers to “bring cash” if they are planning to go out.
A Mastercard spokesperson said: “There was a period of time earlier today in which some Mastercard transactions were declined. The situation has been resolved and all systems are 1741519028 working as normal.”
It comes just hours after an outage of fellow banking giant Barclays’ online services, prompting over 1,000 complaints after users were left unable to transfer funds between their accounts on Saturday, March 8.
The blip was linked to a “technical issue” that the provider resolved within a few hours – but last month, a major outage went on for days, leaving customers unable to access their money for over 48 hours.
Problems with a third-party payment provider also temporarily prevented Visa and Mastercard users from accessing their funds last July, with Mastercard acknowledging “payment transaction issues at select merchants in the UK”.
Digital contactless payments now account for around 70% of “card present” transactions around the globe, according to Mastercard’s President for the Americas, Linda Kirkpatrick.
The shift in customer patterns provides impetus for banking providers to boost security for their digital channels, Kirkpatrick told Yahoo Finance.
“Consumers are getting more comfortable with transacting through digital means and … as we see that trend unfolding, our investment in safety and security tools becomes even more important,” she said.
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