Mastercard has followed Visa in suffering an intermittent outage that caused some card payments to be denied overnight.
The downtime was first picked up yesterday evening and persisted for a four-hour period until 10pm, hitting customers at multiple banks in the UK and US.
"A scheduled system update caused Mastercard transactions to be declined for a brief period of time earlier today," Mastercard says. "The situation has been resolved and all systems are working as normal."
In June, more than five million transactions across Europe failed during an unprecedented 10 hour outage at Visa.
The latest glitch is another reversal for the card giants' attempts to evangelise for the utopian vision of a cashless society, highlighting a perilous dependency on card payments as contactless progressively eats into market share of cash. Just today Mastercard was trumpeting a new deal with SIX Payment Services to enable the new Generali Arena football stadium in Vienna to go completely cashless, and in June, debit card payments overtook cash in the UK for the first time, spurred by the rising popularity of contactless and online shopping.