Weekend Mastercard outage resolved, but is customer trust at risk?

The payment provider did not disclose how long the outage lasted, but did confirm that ATMs remained operational, and that the issue had since been resolved.

“The situation has been resolved and all systems are working as normal,” the company said in the same statement.

Australia’s largest bank, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, also issued warnings regarding the outage, advising that those experiencing issues enter their card into an eftpos machine and hit the ‘savings’ option.

“Mastercard card payments are being restored following a global Mastercard issue,” the bank said.

“If customers are still experiencing a decline, please insert your card and select ‘savings’ to make payments via eftpos.”

Outages erode trust in vendors

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As found in the Australian Payments Network Resilience in Payments Insights Report, an increased public reliance on digital systems means that the host of those systems is likely to lose customer trust when things go wrong.

Previous outages due to standard updates and software changes such as seen with Optus, CrowdStrike and Telstra show that managing software updates on systems being used by large numbers of people is a critical challenge.

The report outlines that when these things go wrong, public opinion changes rapidly, urging vendors to prepare for outage events.

“Modern payments rely on complex, tightly integrated technology environments,” the report says.

“Failures in software, infrastructure, or change processes can scale rapidly,” it continues, adding that even minor outages can lead to “a direct and immediate impact on trust.

“The key risk is not only that technology can fail, but that failures can propagate quickly when shared platforms are embedded across multiple sectors.

“Collectively, these developments are reshaping how payments resilience is understood and assessed.”