Mastercard Outage Disrupts Payments Across Australia
Customers reported widespread issues with Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Android Pay on Saturday, leading to transaction failures at major retailers.
A global Mastercard issue caused significant payment disruptions across Australia on Saturday, leaving customers unable to complete transactions at various outlets.
Reports emerged of widespread problems with Mastercard, Apple Pay, and Android Pay, affecting a range of businesses. Customers took to social media and outage reporting websites to voice their frustrations.
One user reported being unable to make a purchase at Bunnings, a major hardware store chain. Another described similar issues at Woolworths, a large supermarket, with both Westpac and Commonwealth Bank (CBA) payment systems on mobile devices failing. Some terminals, such as those at a football club's Square system, were reportedly only accepting Visa payments.
Downdetector, a platform for reporting service outages, logged over 1,700 reports concerning Mastercard issues by 3 p.m. on Saturday.
A spokeswoman for Commonwealth Bank confirmed the problem was a "global Mastercard issue." She advised customers experiencing declined transactions to try inserting their card and selecting 'savings' to process payments via EFTPOS. She assured that other CBA services, including ATMs, remained operational.
Macquarie Bank also alerted its customers to potential difficulties, stating online that they were "currently experiencing an issue with Mastercard debit cards." The bank's teams were reportedly working to resolve the problem as a priority and apologized for the inconvenience.
The outage impacted customers attempting to use both physical bank cards and mobile payment services linked to Mastercard.