Mastercard System Update Causes Widespread Payment Declines in Australia

A scheduled system update caused Mastercard transactions to be declined across Australia on Saturday afternoon. The company described the issue as 'a planned change' that affected payments nationwide. According to Downdetector, more than 1,900 outage reports were logged by mid-afternoon.

Commonwealth Bank told customers that payments were failing, and transfers and mobile banking were among the most common complaints on Downdetector. The issue landed at a particularly inconvenient time for businesses, with one bar manager in Melbourne's Collingwood saying they had a 'whole night to get through' and that it could be 40% of their takings.

The Reserve Bank found that cash is becoming more popular as people hold onto it due to concerns about the reliability of electronic payments. More than three-quarters of Australians carry some cash, with a median of around A$65. The European Central Bank has also been working on an answer to this worry by naming 36 payment firms for its digital euro pilot.

Regulators are coming at the concentration problem from another angle by designating Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Oracle as critical third parties to the UK's financial system. This move brings them under direct oversight. The particular outage lasted hours and caused problems for some businesses, but the uncomfortable part is how ordinary the cause was.