Black Friday disruption as Bank of Spain wants answers over payment platform crash

THE BANK OF SPAIN is seeking clarification after pre-Black Friday problems with the country’s Redsys payments network.

The platform went down on Thursday with Bizum payments not being accepted and card terminals not working- ahead of one of the biggest shopping periods of the year.

The outage lasted for around two hours with Redsys saying it was a ‘transitory instability’ in the system for processing payment transactions.

The network also crashed last Saturday causing disruption to users, who complained about issues with credit card payments and ATM withdrawals that didn’t happen.

Redsys said those problems were down to internal communication issues.

The platform is jointly owned by Spain’s banks including BBVA, Caixabank, and Sabadell- handling all electronic payment transactions including Bizum mobile phone payments.

It was set up in the 1980s and acts as an intermediary between banks, shops and buyers to ensure the security of transactions, with over 45 million payments handled monthly.