Today’s reports of users who encounter problems in making payments on the circuit continue today MasterCard. Both online purchases and payments in physical stores through POS would in fact have presented malfunctions since yesterday morning, with terminals that reported transactions refused without apparent reason.
Down of the Mastercard circuit: user reports
The reports spread rapidly, with a peak between 09:00 and 10:00 in the morning yesterday 9 March, and involved various countries, including theItalyThe United KingdomThe JapantheAustralia el ‘Ukraine. According to the data collected by Downdetectora participatory portal that collects reports from users around the world, most problems concerned transactions, while a minor percentage has reported difficulties with online purchases and the use of banking apps. After a few hours, the situation has slowly returned, but it remains important to analyze what happened, what the causes may have been and if it was a real blackout of the payment circuit or if the news has been “inflated” by the newspapers.
What happened with the Mastercard circuit
When interruptions occur in the financial services of a giant such as Mastercard, the cause can be attributable to different Technical factors. Payment circuits work through a complex network of digital servers and infrastructures that process every real -time transaction. A malfunction on data centersa synchronization problem between the various banking systems or aInterruption in communications with the POS These are some of the possible reasons that can lead to a temporary blocking of the operations. Another possibility is that of a Overload of the networkperhaps due to a sudden increase in transactions or a bad software update.
Some IT disservices may also be the result of computer attacks. One of the techniques most used by hackers is the Ddos (Distributed denial of service), which consists in sending a huge number of requests to servers to send them on tilt and temporarily make them unusable. In the specific case of Mastercard’s Down, there are no official statements that suggest a computer attack as the cause of the incident. Indeed, to be honest, Mastercard has not yet released communications on what happened, so it is impossible to determine which of the aforementioned hypotheses is the most probable of all.
In any case, the testimonies of the users confirm that the problem was not limited to a single geographical area. Some customers reported not having managed to use their cards for over 24 hours, both abroad and in Italy. In Piacenza, according to a report, all the terminals seemed not to accept payments with Mastercard, while in another report a user said he had difficulty both in Spain, at Valencia airport, and once returned to Italy. The map of reports in Italy shows a greater concentration in large cities such as Milan, Rome, Turin, Bologna And Naples.
The real proportions of the Down Mastercard
Analyzing the data of Downdetectorthe number of reports recorded It was not so high that it thinks about a real global blackout. Internationally, such an event should generate thousands of reports in a few minutes, but in the case of Mastercard the maximum peak it was less than 150 reports. For comparison, large -scale problems involving platforms such as Instagram or online banking services record much higher volumes. Even by observing the reports relating to the main banks that support Mastercard, there are no significant anomalies. This could suggest that the problem has had a localized and non -systemic impact.
The rumors about the nature of the disservice led some media to talk about a large -scale down down, but the objective data do not fully support this hypothesis. If there had been a widespread failure at the level of central infrastructure, more extensive and lasting inconvenience would probably have been recorded, with much more numerous reports from both users and banking institutions themselves.
What to do in case of future problems in payments
However, episodes like this highlight the importance of Always have payment alternatives. Bringing a credit/debt card with it belonging to a different circuit or having a little cash, it can certainly mitigate the inconvenience generated by similar problems. Even if the malfunction seems to have returned (at least when we write), it must be taken into account that events of this type can happen and captain. Better not to be unwary!
