MasterCard site suffers outage; no attack

SAN FRANCISCO — MasterCard's website was knocked offline Tuesday in an outage the credit card brand described as unrelated to recent hacking attacks.

While some hackers celebrated online, MasterCard Inc. said that the disruption was not the result of the type of "denial-of-service" attacks that forced MasterCard's site offline in December after it blocked payments to WikiLeaks, the secret-sharing site that outraged the U.S. government by publishing secret diplomatic cables. A hacking group called Anonymous launched attacks against MasterCard, Visa and others in protest.

MasterCard says the latest outage was caused by a problem at MasterCard's Internet provider. It would not specify the problem or the Internet provider, but insisted the outage was not caused by hacking. It said customer data were not stolen.