newy.com.au – A global Mastercard problem disrupted checkouts across Newcastle and the Hunter on Saturday afternoon, leaving some shoppers unable to complete purchases before services were restored.
Mastercard said a “scheduled system update” caused transactions to be declined for a period. “The situation has been resolved and all systems are working as normal,” a spokesperson said.
newy.com.au readers reported failed payments at Bunnings Heatherbrae, Woolworths and KFC at Mayfield, BP Jesmond and Green Hills. The disruption was intermittent: some phone payments failed while physical cards worked, others said both methods were rejected, and some transactions succeeded at one retailer after being declined at another.
“Everyone at Bunnings Heatherbrae got stuck,” Kris Maree said. “Most people, us included, left our items and walked out.”
At Mayfield, Stephen Tuckwell said his card was declined at Woolworths, while another reader reported seeing at least three people encounter problems there. Felicity Brown said payments through Apple Wallet, Samsung Wallet and a physical card had failed, although she was able to withdraw cash.
Toni Wallace said her card was declined at Coles but worked at Bakers Delight five minutes later. Other readers reported successful payments during the same period, reflecting the inconsistent nature of the disruption.
The local accounts coincided with more than 1700 user reports of Mastercard problems recorded by outage-tracking website Downdetector at 3pm. Separate payment processors began logging Mastercard errors about 2pm across Australia, New Zealand, the Asia-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas.
The disruption was initially described by many shoppers as Apple Pay being down, but it was not an outage confined to Apple’s service. Mobile wallets pass transactions through the network attached to the stored card, meaning Mastercard-backed cards could be declined through Apple Pay, Google Wallet or Samsung Wallet as well as when the physical card was tapped.
Simply switching from a phone to tapping the same card was therefore not a guaranteed solution.
“If customers experience a decline, please insert your card and select ‘savings’ to make payments via eftpos,” CommBank advised during the outage.
Selecting savings on an eligible dual-network debit card routes the payment through Australia’s separate eftpos network instead of Mastercard. The workaround was not available for Mastercard credit cards or debit cards without eftpos functionality. CommBank said ATMs and its other banking services remained available.
Payment processor Windcave said Mastercard transactions began succeeding again about 3.30pm. CommBank marked the global issue as restored at 4.30pm. Mastercard has not disclosed how many transactions were declined.
