Mastercard down and out for today

MasterCard is reportedly down across the UK as hundreds have complained on social media. People’s cards are reportedly not working in stores such as Morrisons, Aldi, and Asda, with store managers saying it is a MasterCard problem.

An independent website, called DownDetector tracks the number of complaints every company gets through social media. Whilst Visa have also seen complaints, MasterCard is at its peak at 476 complaints. There was a spike in complaints starting from 11.30am this morning. But MasterCard have not put out a statement yet.

Whilst the reasoning and extent of the outage is unknown, it is affecting a large number of people across the UK as banks such as Santander, Starling Bank, Barclaycard, HSBC, Monzo, Metro, Virgin, First Direct and Thinkmoney all use MasterCards.

Hi Dave 👋 Sorry for the trouble. We've been made aware of issues with Mastercard and Visa. Unfortunately these issues are with them, not Monzo specifically. Our engineers are working to get this fixed as soon as possible. We're sorry for any inconvenience 🙏

— Monzo (@monzo) March 5, 2022

There are also complaints about Visa cards, although these are substantially fewer. Monzo, amongst the banks facing the same problem, have been active on Twitter replying to complaints and have told people it’s a problem with both Visa and MasterCard.

Therefore, if you have cash, it may be best to use it today!

MasterCard and Visa have also both seen drops in their stock prices in the last few days, Visa dropped by around $10 between March 3-4, whilst MasterCard saw a nearly $20 drop. This could be due to the sanctions that MasterCard and Visa have put on Russia, due to their invasion of Ukraine. At the time Don Fandetti, an analyst with Wells Fargo & Co, a financial services company, told the WallStreet Journal of his fears of the sanctions restricting international growth.