Mastercard has restored normal network operations after a scheduled system update caused widespread transaction declines across Australia for several hours on Saturday.
The US-based payments company confirmed the outage on Saturday. Although the disruption affected Mastercard’s global network, its impact was most noticeable among shoppers in Australia. Mastercard has not said how many customers in the country were affected.
According to ABC, Mastercard found that a scheduled system update had gone wrong, leaving customers with declined transactions for several hours. The problem was fixed by the end of the day, but the company has not said exactly what the update was supposed to do.
Many shoppers were left stuck when their Mastercard credit cards stopped working. According to ABC, some even tried using another card without success, forcing them to leave their shopping behind and go home for cash. When they came back, the problem had already been fixed.
Downdetector data showed reports of card problems rising above 1,700 by 3 p.m. before dropping to 173 two hours later. Most reports involved fund transfers and mobile banking, while cash withdrawals and Apple Pay were also affected.
The incident is a good reminder of how much people rely on digital payment networks. Mastercard and Visa are at the heart of that system, which is why even a short outage can cause major headaches when payments suddenly stop working.
Following the infamous CrowdStrike outage a few years ago, banking groups warned about the risks of relying too heavily on digital payments and electronic payment processors. They argued that another incident on a similar scale could bring a largely cashless society to a halt, highlighting the continued importance of physical cash.
The Mastercard outage this weekend shows why those warnings still matter. If a similar problem ever hit the network worldwide, the fallout could be much worse, especially for people who hardly carry cash anymore.
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