MasterCard caught with pants down twice

Red and orange balls blush

By Kelly Fiveash • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 4th October 2007 11:18 GMT

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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. ®

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