At 1:10 p.m. this Saturday, with bars and restaurants in half of Spain full, Redsys suffered a massive crash. Few citizens knew this name then, but in a few minutes they would. It is the platform that operates card and ATM payments and applications like Bizum. For a few hours, all digital payment methods stopped working in Spain, you could only pay in cash. Many users took to social media to report different incidents. It was there that large banks such as BBVA or La Caixa confirmed that their payment applications had stopped working, pointing to Redsys as the source of the problem.
The platform @Redsys_es has experienced a fall that affects bank payment systems. We hope it is resolved in a short period of time.
Sorry for the inconvenience.— BBVA in Spain (@BBVA_espana) November 18, 2023
The DownDetector website, specialized in recording mishaps in internet-connected services in real time, detected incidents starting at 1:10 p.m. (Spanish peninsular time) in applications such as BBVA, Santander or Visa. In Google Trends, the interest of the word Redsys It increased from 0 to 100 in just over an hour, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. A few minutes later, around 2:45 p.m., the system began to return to normal. Redsys itself indicated on its X account (former Twitter) that the problem had already been solved and it was providing its services normally. As she explained, the failure was due to the platform’s internal communication lines, ruling out an external attack. She has also added that payments made during the fall time will be regularized in the next few hours.
We inform you that the payment service degradations of the last hour, exclusively linked to internal communication lines, have been resolved.
— Redsys (@Redsys_es) November 18, 2023
Redsys is a virtual payment platform to which more than 60 banks and savings banks in Spain join to manage their electronic business. It has more than 40 years of history and, according to experts in the sector, it is one of the fastest and safest electronic commerce platforms, internationally.
The different Spanish financial entities unified the three payment processors, Redsys, Iberpay, and the Cecabank payment platform, in 2019. The move meant they saved costs, but the concentration of all of them on a single platform has made this type of problems have more serious consequences, as all users are concentrated on a single platform.
This has coincided with a considerable reduction in payments with physical money in Spain. According to data from the European Central Bank, cash payments decreased by 18% between 2019 and 2022, a figure only surpassed by Cyprus (with 23%).
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