(Reuters) – Belarus on Tuesday suffered a temporary mass outage of bank cards, its largest payments processor said, as some of its major banks find themselves under Western sanctions.
Card holders across the country reported on social media that in-store card payments were not working and that they were having difficulty withdrawing cash from ATMs.
Belarus’s Banking Processing Centre attributed the outage to a technical issue and said all bank cards were now working.
Card payment failures have become a regular occurrence in Belarus in recent months following the introduction of sanctions against several banks by the European Union and United States.
The sanctions are designed to punish Minsk for facilitating Moscow’s military intervention in Ukraine.
(Reporting by Reuters;Editing by Kevin Liffey)
