Banks solve problems with Mastercard payments

This was an international issue that affected me personally here in Austria. Tried paying and received a cryptic error. Withdrawals via ATM, even at the bank I was affiliated with, yielded similar results.

As I encountered this just after closing time, I had to spend 34 min trying to reach a support rep, who already knew what was going on. Heard from a few friends and family that had trouble paying for groceries and other necessities, which is, of course, also quite embarrassing and, depending on how important what they wanted to buy was, simply not acceptable.

As someone who has become almost entirely reliant on GPay, I am disappointed that such an error can affect POS, withdrawals and online payment all at once, whilst taking multiple hours to address. Errors can happen, but this is simply too long for such vital services.

I will fully admit that I know absolutely nothing about the complexity behind the billions of transactions that are handled each day by these systems, beyond that they must be complex and the people working in the background on these are handling massive, difficult tasks on the regular, but I feel that ATM, POS and online should somehow be separate, so if one fails, the others can help mitigate the issues for most people. I was at the post office when first encountering the issue and had an ATM right there, which could have solved the issue in my case, had ATMs not also been affected.

The way it was, I got double the embarrassment, first failing to pay at POS, then failing to withdrawal at the same place.

Try to reduce the single points of failure in mission critical areas of one’s life.

Diversify one’s payment networks. Get a visa and Mastercard. Or Amex.