MasterCard resolves global outage
Global payment services provider, MasterCard, had declared that it promptly resolved glitches that rendered users all over the world unable to make online or in-person payments early Sunday morning.
Senior Vice President in charge of Communications, Seth Eisen, said in a statement that the situation in which some MasterCard transactions were declined on Sunday has been resolved and “all systems are working as normal.”
DownDetector, a website that catalogues real-time reports of issues and outages, reported that hundreds of people in about 65 countries all experienced a loss in services for a brief but troubling period.
MasterCard explained in response to the DownDetector report that there was a glitch affecting transactions “that has since been resolved.”
The system failure and related inability to pay reportedly affected both users of Visa and MasterCard.
Visa last experienced 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 the 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.
