Payment Full Outage

Overview

How it works and why it matters

A full payment outage is a period when an essential payment function becomes unavailable for all or nearly all relevant users or routes. The precise scope matters: a checkout page can load while invoice creation, transaction monitoring or payouts have stopped. Incident teams should define which services and merchants were affected, when the fault began, and how they will recover payments initiated during the disruption. Restoring an API endpoint does not automatically reconcile events that arrived during downtime.

Technical context

The scope must identify the affected product, geography, method, route, environment, and whether read, write, settlement, or administrative functions are unavailable.

Practical checks

Maintain a timeline of last healthy transaction observation, affected networks, missed webhook deliveries and the ledger checkpoint before the fault. After service restoration, reprocess authoritative chain or provider events from that checkpoint with deduplication. Customers whose transfers succeeded during the outage should not be charged again.

Related concepts

Payment Business Continuity; Payment High Availability; Payment Automatic Failover