MasterCard caught with pants down twice

Red and orange balls blush

By Kelly Fiveash, 4th October 2007

Cash credit giant MasterCard has had a week racked with technical problems.

Reg readers may recall our report on Tuesday about a spot of bother with data processing at MasterCard which hit a sizeable amount of transactions on September 25 and 26.

We had contacted MasterCard after hearing from readers about problems with the system last weekend which left thousands going home with empty shopping bags on Saturday afternoon.

Strangely, the official statement we received revealed that the cash-pumping behemoth had in fact been hit by a separate system blunder last week, with "issuing bank submitted data" being flagged up as the culprit.

Until now, MasterCard has shied away from telling us what went wrong on Saturday 29 September. But a statement that was finally sent to us last night explained that the latest cockup was outside of MasterCard's control.

It said: "On Saturday 29 September, between approximately 13:30 and 17:00 BST, there was a limited outage to the authorisation service for UK Domestic Maestro transactions, impacting a number of cardholders and retail merchants."

Indeed, many of you complained that credit cards failed to work in retail outlets across the country on Saturday because of the technical problems.

Offering assurances that should warm the cockles of shopping addicts throughout the land, MasterCard reckons the tills should be ringing as normal from now on.

It said it has now sorted out the transaction blunder, and added that it has taken "corrective action" to ensure the issue with Maestro does not reoccur in the future. ®

Cloud based data management

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Posted Friday 5th October 2007 04:42 GMT

Arif Rashid

what really p*sses me off

Banks/visa/mastercard are the biggest bunch of con artists ever. They are very quick to take money out of your account (always same day) and will charge you intereste at the drop of a hat. Try and get ur money back from them, or hell, want to spend your own money when u want and hey presto! Sorry, the systems are down... Yeah right. Its high time that banks, credit card companies and insurance companies all get their fingers out and start providing a proper service.

Posted Friday 5th October 2007 00:13 GMT

Morely Dotes

All of them will have problems...

Eventually.

Over here in the States, Visa is running a series of TV ads which insult anyone who doesn't use Visa to buy, well, anything, from fast food to clothing. The catch phrase is "Life comes at you fast." The implication is that using cash or checks is much slower than using Visa, which is, of course (1) patently false; (2) insulting to the point that I am nearly ready to tell my bank to either give me a non-Visa ATM card, or I will change banks; and (3) going to be infinitely amusing when (not "if" - I am an I.T. professional, and I promise you it _will_ happen sooner or later) Visa's processing network suffers a major cockup.

The arrogance of these people amazes me. Well, no, thinking about it, I suppose it doesn't. People who don't know WTF they are talking about are usually pretty arrogant on the subject.

Posted Thursday 4th October 2007 15:44 GMT

Gareth Harmer