Payment disruptions are no longer rare inconveniences. As demonstrated by the influx of outages in the UK, they have become a modern-day reality with serious commercial consequences. Research from Dynatrace, in collaboration with FreedomPay, reveals that in the UK alone, outages could cost the retail and hospitality sector £1.6 billion in lost revenue every year.
As digital dependency deepens, a single outage triggers a domino effect: stalling payment operations, halting sales and eroding customer confidence. What’s more, the impact lingers long after systems are restored with one in three consumers losing trust in a business after just a single payment failure. Payment resilience, therefore, is not just an IT concern, it’s a reputational imperative.
That’s why businesses need more than a reactive approach; they need real-time observability across their entire payment ecosystem. Modern IT environments are too complex for human oversight alone and without instant visibility into system health, even minor issues can snowball into major outages. Integrated systems that combine AI-powered observability with dynamic failover options, give organisations the insight to detect, isolate, and resolve problems before they disrupt transactions, protecting both revenue and reputation at the moments that matter most.
Payment outages: an everyday risk
Organisations are under greater pressure than ever to digitise quickly and provide frictionless customer experiences. But accelerated innovation also raises the risk of outages, including hardware failures, software bugs, cyber-attacks and human error.
As a result, on average, UK business report over five major outages per year. Even a routine software update can trigger a major point of failure.
The interdependence of systems means that these failures are not isolated events. One failure can knock out payment terminals, Wi-Fi, mobile ordering, cloud-based services and digital tills simultaneously. In high-footfall environments like hospitality and retail, this creates a disproportionate impact.
Customers won’t wait or forgive payment failures
Just under a third (30%) of consumers always carry cash, meaning when payments fail, transactions stop instantly. At the same time, customer expectations have never been higher. Payments are expected to be instant, invisible and fail-proof. Even a short delay creates friction; while delays under six minutes are broadly tolerated, disruptions beyond that cause a steep rise in lost sales.
In the short term, the consequence is financial with card machine failures accounting for £392 million in lost sales annually. However, the longer-term consequence is damaged loyalty. Today’s customers are impatient and payment delays are the fastest way to dampen trust.
Complex systems demand proactive approaches
The complexity of modern IT stacks has outgrown human oversight. The majority (86%) of technology leaders say their systems are too complex for humans to manage alone. Yet, one in five retail and hospitality businesses still lack a secure digital backup when systems fail.
Most businesses are responding with a Frankenstein patchwork of solutions. As it stands, 7% have no backup at all, 48% have invested in secondary internet connections to keep POS systems online and 43% have adopted mobile-based backup options, such as QR codes or app checkouts. These measures show good intent but the diversity and inconsistency of approaches signal a lack of cohesive resilience planning.
Businesses must move beyond firefighting, towards building end-to-end resilience. Speed can have a real impact on the outcome of an outage: if payment systems are restored in under 10 minutes, businesses can avoid over 80% of the total financial impact.
Building resilience
To foster resilience, businesses need to integrate observability systems that isolate faults, maintain uptime and keep transactions flowing. AI-powered observability platforms can monitor and mitigate issues in real time before they escalate, automatically preventing and remediating disruptions.
As well as revealing the source and cause of problems, these insights need to illustrate the impact of outages so IT leaders have the information the C-Suite needs to keep shareholders and other key stakeholders informed on their response effort. It’s not enough to know that an application was offline for a given length of time. Business leaders need to understand the impact on the outcomes they are measured against, such as the number of customers impacted, or the amount of revenue lost.
Payment resilience is a critical business capability
In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, seamless payment experiences are non-negotiable. As IT outages become more frequent and disruptive, it’s imperative that retail and hospitality businesses prioritise payment resilience. Every organisation should map the types of incidents that could impact services and be ready to respond at speed.
The financial impact of outages is significant, but the erosion of customer trust and brand loyalty can cause long term damage.
Those that take a proactive, AI-driven approach — with full visibility across their systems, secure backup capabilities and automated fault isolation — will not only minimise revenue loss but protect customer trust in the moments that matter most.
Martin Bradbury
Martin Bradbury is Regional Vice President, UK&I at Dynatrace. An experienced senior leader with a diverse background in leading sales teams in software, solutions and services, Martin’s focus is building and optimising high performance teams to drive growth and new service offerings.
