Mastercard Outage in Australia Disrupts Card Payments

A Mastercard outage in Australia caused card payment failures across Australia on Saturday afternoon, with shoppers in several states reporting declined transactions at checkouts, ATMs and via Apple Pay, according to ABC News. Mastercard said the disruption was caused by a scheduled system update and has since been resolved.

"A scheduled system update caused Mastercard transactions to be declined for a period of time earlier today. The situation has been resolved and all systems are working as normal," Mastercard told the ABC in a statement.

Commonwealth Bank said the issue stemmed from a "global Mastercard issue," which it confirmed had also been resolved. The outage affected a range of services, including in-store card payments, cash withdrawals and transactions using Mastercard travel cards.

Shoppers in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland contacted the ABC to report difficulties completing purchases. Among them was Jackie Wells, from Bayside, Victoria, who was attempting to pay for a $208 shop at Aldi when her cards were declined at two separate checkout stations.

"I had a trolley full of all sorts of goods, $208 altogether, so a fair bit," Wells said. "I tried one card and it was declined, tried another card and it was declined, so we went to another POS station and they were both declined again."

Wells said she called her husband to bring a different card, which was also declined. Unable to withdraw cash either, the couple left their shopping in the store's cool storage area and returned home to collect cash. She said she saw other shoppers leaving stores "disgruntled" after being unable to pay for their purchases. By the time she returned to the store, the payment issue had been resolved.

Downdetector, a website that tracks user-reported service outages, recorded more than 1,700 reports of Mastercard-related issues at 3pm on Saturday. That figure had fallen to 173 reports two hours later, according to the site. The most commonly reported problems involved funds transfers and mobile banking.

Readers can find further information via Mastercard's official website and its Mastercard Status page.

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