One of the worst excuses to have for not safeguarding your business from payment outages is an “it won’t happen to me” mindset. Such an attitude is a pardonable misconception for a small business. The resources they have are often very limited, and the transaction flow is easily manageable thanks to its moderate scale. Still, we believe that even for such businesses payment downtimes should be an issue providing food for thought and meriting consideration. Large enterprises also often tend to have an “it won’t happen to me” mindset. A few lucky ones, who have been working and growing for years without facing a global payments outage, are most likely to fall into this trap and be hit by a sudden payments downtime the most.
So, no matter what kind of a business you run, if you accept payments online, the necessary steps need to be taken to prevent an incident from occurring. In this article, we’ve gathered the data showing that no business is immune to payment downtimes, and advice on alleviating the related risks.
Outages are increasing in frequency
Online businesses typically rely on a complex microservices architecture to run their day-to-day activities. A lot can go wrong, from hardware issues, unavailability of internet or electricity, to payment provider outage. Being online businesses themselves, payment providers may also be vulnerable to all kinds of technical problems resulting in downtime. It can impact revenue, damage customer trust, and consume engineering time for both themselves and the businesses they serve. Of course, trustworthy payment gateways do their best to avoid such situations.
However, no one is immune — even the titans are prone to outages. For instance, in October 2020, Eurosystem-owned TARGET2, the platform for processing large-value payments, was down for almost 10 hours due to an unexpected incident. Then, Google ended the year with a notable outage that took down Gmail, Drive, and all other Workspace apps. A few weeks later, Slack faced disruptions, which lasted for a few hours as users returned to work after the holidays.
