Mastercard has smoothed out a brief glitch that gave cardholders a Sunday surprise, temporarily pausing online payments on Sunday.
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According to Fox Business, citing the outage-tracking website DownDetector, hundreds of cardholders across the U.S., United Kingdom, Japan, Italy, and Australia reported issues early Sunday morning.
Mastercard informed Fox Business Digital of a temporary issue impacting certain transactions, which has now been fully resolved.
“There was a period of time earlier today in which some Mastercard transactions were declined. The situation has been resolved and all systems are working as normal,” Seth Eisen, senior vice president of communications, explained to the outlet in an email.
Mastercard hasn’t disclosed the cause of the outage or the number of users impacted.
The cause of the outage, its scope, and whether it impacted debit cards, credit cards, or both remain unclear. Sunday morning, Ukrainians reported the highest number of banking-related issues, according to Interfax Ukraine.
Reports on social media indicate that both Visa and Mastercard users experienced payment disruptions. Privatbank, Ukraine’s largest bank by assets, issues cards supported by both payment processors.
Visa’s last major outage was in June 2018, when millions of people across Europe couldn’t use their Visa cards to make purchases, per the Daily Mail.
Mastercard Reported Impressive Fourth-Quarter Earnings
Meanwhile, Mastercard delivered impressive fourth-quarter earnings. Although smaller than Visa in transaction volume, Mastercard reported a 16% year-over-year increase in net revenue. Executives attribute this achievement to robust and resilient consumer spending.
‘The macroeconomic environment continues to perform well, and it is underpinned by healthy consumer spending,’ Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach declared in a January earnings call. per the Mail.
“The labor market is strong with low unemployment and continued wage growth. Inflation has moderated, but to varying degrees across categories and countries. Consumers remain engaged,” Miebach added.
One of the biggest challenges Mastercard faces is Capital One’s acquisition of Discover, a competing payment network. Currently, Capital One relies on Mastercard as its primary payment processor. However, if Capital One transitions to using Discover instead, Mastercard could lose hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.