By Daily Mail (U.S.) | Created at 2025-03-09 15:33:09 | Updated at 2025-03-09 22:19:14
7 hours ago
Mastercard users all over the world reported being unable to make online or in-person payments early Sunday morning.
Hundreds of people in as many as 65 countries - including the United States, Japan, Italy and Australia - all experienced a loss in services for a brief but troubling period, according to DownDetector, a website that catalogues real-time reports of issues and outages.
Mastercard told Fox Business there was a glitch affecting transactions that has since been 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, said in a statement.
DailyMail.com approached Mastercard for further comment.
There is no indication of what caused the outage, the scale of the issue or whether it affected debit cards, credit cards or both.
One French user on X claimed that the glitch affected Apple Pay and Google Pay, plus physical ATMs.
Ukrainians in particular logged the most reports of banking-related problems this morning, according to Interfax Ukraine.
Mastercard confirmed reports that there was a problem with its payment systems, adding that the issue has since been resolved
However, the inability to pay reportedly affected both users of Visa and Mastercard, according to various social media reports.
Privatbank, the largest bank in Ukraine by assets, issues cards using both payment processors.
DailyMail.com approached Visa for comment.
Visa last experience a large-scale outage in June 2018, when millions of people across Europe could not buy anything with Visa cards.
Despite this recent bump for Mastercard, the payment giant reported strong fourth quarter earnings.
The company, which is generally smaller than Visa in terms of transaction volume, saw 16 percent growth in net revenue year over year, a feat executives largely say is due to resilient consumer spending.
'The macroeconomic environment continues to perform well, and it is underpinned by healthy consumer spending,' Mastercard CEO Michael Miebach said on a January 30 earnings call.
'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,' he added.
One of Mastercard's biggest upcoming headwinds is Capital One's acquisition of Discover, a rival payment network.
Since Mastercard is currently Capital One's chosen payment processor, the firm stands to lose hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue if Discover is used instead.
