Redsys crashes: uncovering the causes and exploring solutions for greater payment security

How single reliance can affect Spanish banking and the importance of secure alternatives

Redsys is the main electronic payment processing infrastructure in Spain, responsible for handling 85% of transactions for around 60 financial institutions in the country.

Recently, this platform experienced significant outages that affected all Spanish banks, causing interruptions in the dataphone and online payment systems, which led the Bank of Spain and the Government to initiate investigations to clarify the events.

The incident on November 18 affected 2,5% of electronic payment transactions in Spain, while the one on the night of Thursday, November 23 resulted in intermittent connection outages for approximately two hours, affecting 1,7% of transactions.

Technical failure or perfect storm of payments?

Redsys attributed these problems to a ‘technical incident’ that caused a transient instability in the system, identifying a failure in one of the technological equipment as the root cause of the problem, ruling out the possibility of a cyber-attack.

However, other sources suggest that a system overload, exacerbated by an increase in online and dataphone payments due to the proximity of Black Friday, may have been the cause.

These incidents highlight the vulnerability of relying on a single payment processing system, especially during periods of high transaction volume such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, sales and so on. The impact was such that across Spain professionals such as cab drivers, restaurants and merchants experienced the impossibility of making transactions, significantly affecting their business operations.

The importance of payment diversification

As an alternative, PaynoPain offers a diversified payment solution that allows merchants to process transactions through both local and international schemes, reducing dependency on a single system and increasing resilience to potential failures. Our ability to switch between payment processors ensures continuity of service even in the face of incidents such as those experienced by Redsys, providing security and confidence to our customers.

At PaynoPain, we take rigourous measures to minimize the chances of system downtime, whether due to human error or service overload. Our system upgrades, a common cause of online outages, are planned two weeks in advance and undergo a week of extensive testing prior to implementation. In addition, we apply a ‘freeze’ policy during critical periods such as Black Friday, which prevents upgrades in the previous two weeks, thus avoiding any anomalies.

We have an advanced cloud infrastructure that allows us to dynamically scale processing capacity according to demand, ensuring exceptional availability. Our platform has maintained an uptime of 99.999% throughout the year, and in November, a month of high commercial activity, we sustained an uptime of 99.99%. This commitment to stability and service continuity contrasts with the recent challenges faced by Redsys, highlighting the strength and reliability of our payment solutions.