"We’re undergoing site maintenance.
But don’t worry — as there’s no impact to your ability to make Mastercard purchases or payments"
Unless you're Russian I guess.
As much as I enjoy the act this could backfire as a show of the tremendous power these companies have: shutting down credit card payments will likely impact large portions of online payments.
But at the same time every extra inefficiency in the Russian economy could translate into less bullets going to kill Ukrainians
I'm not sure that many people realise what economic sanctions mean, as I replied to someone else on this thread:
"As a result of sanction orders, we have blocked multiple financial institutions from the Mastercard payment network. We will continue to work with regulators in the days ahead to abide fully by our compliance obligations as they evolve."
> Also I'm not sure I'd call it a sanction since it's coming from a private company, not a government.
It's following sanctions, which blacklist all big Russian banks and remove them from international banking and financing arrangements. Even if Visa/MasterCard aren't explicitly prohibited from dealing in Russia, how are they supposed to move money around with the sanctions in place? It's because of the sanctions.
> If I were any country right now I'd also take it as a warning to not depend on Mastercard or Visa given the immense power they hold
They can try not invading other countries, that seems to do the trick. Joking aside, countries like France have their own independent networks ( Carte Bleue in France) over which payments pass in some scenarios ( honestly couldn't tell, but for instance there are weird cards from some banks that only work on the CB network and don't outside of France, even if they're supposedly Visa/MC).
I think the point the gp was making was with regards to sanctions from private entities. My note here is that while the scale of private entities sanctions currently is novel, they themselves are not, e.g. boycotts have happened in the past many times.
Unless you're Russian I guess.
As much as I enjoy the act this could backfire as a show of the tremendous power these companies have: shutting down credit card payments will likely impact large portions of online payments.
But at the same time every extra inefficiency in the Russian economy could translate into less bullets going to kill Ukrainians