Global Mastercard Payment Outages Lead To Consumer Complaints

An outage caused Mastercard customers around the world to be blocked from using their credit cards. It was not clear what caused the outage, which led to a number of complaints to banks and other card issuers, from customers across much of Europe and the U.S., who were unable to complete their payments.

The U.K. digital bank Monzo wrote in a tweet, “The Mastercard network had a partial outage starting at 6:05 pm that caused some payments to decline. We are seeing card payments succeed as of 7:40 pm and Mastercard [has] told us that the issue has been resolved.”

Mastercard said on Thursday evening (July 12) that the problem had been resolved.

“We are aware that some issues were experienced and have been working hard to resolve it,” said Mastercard in a statement, according to Financial Times. “The situation has been fully resolved and all transactions are now working as normal. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused.”

Customers were clearly angry, though, with the way the company handled the situation. Sarah Louise Wilson in the U.K. tweeted, “Shame @Mastercard can’t communicate their current banking issues so that I can pay for my food shop! What a shambles!!!”

Sharlene Sanders in the Netherlands tweeted, “On a business trip and just tried to pay hotel with @Mastercard. Didn’t work. Called @ING_news and the advice was: Please pay with @Visa. Ain’t that a peach? #fail.”

This outage comes after Visa customers, in parts of the U.K. and Europe, weren’t able to use their cards on June 1 after a system failure prevented transactions from being processed. The Visa failure affected 2.4 million transactions in the U.K. over a 10-hour period, forcing many stores to stop accepting card payments and forcing consumers in some areas to empty local ATMs. Two weeks later, the company revealed in a letter to the Treasury Select Committee it was hiring an outside party to investigate the disruption.