Overview
- Commonwealth Bank issued an alert saying Mastercard card payments are being declined because of a global Mastercard issue and told customers to insert their card and select 'savings' to pay via EFTPOS.
- Customers across multiple Australian banks reported phone tap‑and‑go declines on both iPhone and Android devices as the outage left some checkouts stalled.
- Down Detector logged thousands of Australian reports of payment failures, showing the problem is widespread rather than limited to a single bank or device type.
- Physical debit and credit cards and ATMs continued to work normally, which merchants used to urge shoppers to pay with cards inserted into terminals or with cash.
- The outage stems from the Mastercard network that handles tokenised contactless payments, so failures there can block digital‑wallet taps while domestic chip/EFTPOS rails keep working.