Mastercard Had An Outage, So Crypto Had a Field Day

Payments giant Mastercard suffered a severe outage last week that led to a hold-up in transactions.

The company's Twitter threads soon filled up with comments from cryptocurrency supporters and enthusiasts, who were all too eager to point out the perceived benefits of their preferred payments rail.

What could be considered an inevitable question was eventually posed: why isn't Mastercard using bitcoin?

As CoinDesk has reported, Mastercard is seeking a number of patents around cryptocurrency use - a suggestion that the idea is on its radar.

Critics of the company argued amid the outage that Mastercard will face a "Huge rival" from either bitcoin or another cryptocurrency.

Supporters of specific cryptocurrencies also came out to heckle the payments giant, including supporters of XRP and the technology developed by distributed ledger startup Ripple, and those backing the cryptocurrency Dash.

Would the utilization of blockchain or cryptocurrency have prevented the situation Mastercard found itself in?

Journalist David Cox tackled the question in an article for PaymentsSource, arguing that existing blockchain tech would likely be infeasible for Mastercard's present needs.

Whether the technology as applied to Mastercard could have helped is perhaps an open question, but nonetheless, the situation was an opportunity for the crypto faithful to throw a little shade the company's way.

CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.