Construction Accident Triggers $106 Million Italian Payments Outage

Italy has reportedly restored an outage to its payment services that hindered Black Friday sales.

The disruption on Nov. 28 and 29 had been restored by Saturday (Nov. 30), Bloomberg News reported, citing a statement from the Bank of Italy.

A separate report by Reuters said the outage was triggered when construction on gas roadworks damaged payments company Worldline’s network connection to its data centers in Italy, leading to disruptions for customers. Another payments company, Nexi, was also impacted by the outage and is investigating, Bloomberg said.

The outage hindered sales during Black Friday, the report said, costing merchants roughly $106 million. Italy’s central bank says it will continue monitoring electronic payments functions.

The disruption comes in the closing weeks of a year that has seen several similar glitches, from an attack on France’s telecom services by vandals during the Paris Olympics to the massive outage of Microsoft systems caused by a tech issue at cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

And in February, an outage in AT&T’s network blocked 92 million calls — including 25,000 attempts to dial 911 — impacting customers in all 50 states, Washington, D.C, and territories such as Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Incidents such as these, PYMNTS wrote earlier this year, illustrate “why, in today’s interconnected world, where digital disruptions are, unfortunately, increasingly common, the ability to learn from and adapt to these challenges is crucial for long-term business success.”

In an interview in July, CompoSecure/Arculus Chief Product and Innovation Officer Adam Lowe pointed out that when a software update fails, companies typically have contingency plans. However,  issues with essential security software such as CrowdStrike can quickly spin out of control, and disruptions to core functions, particularly at the Windows startup level, can be tough to fix.

In a separate report this summer, PYMNTS wrote about the importance of collaboration between businesses and their B2B partners for effective disaster recovery. This means things like sharing information about potential threats, coordinating response strategies and holding joint drills and simulations. 

“By working together, businesses and their partners can ensure a more comprehensive and cohesive approach to resilience,” that report said.

“Whether it’s due to a cyberattack, natural disaster or technical failure, an outage can disrupt operations, erode customer trust and incur substantial financial losses. For businesses, the ability to swiftly recover from such incidents is a necessity.”