Dutch payment processor experiences multiple DDoS attacks in one day
An evening of false starts
Just after 7 p.m. on 8 April, diners in Dutch cafés and shoppers across Europe noticed card readers freezing. The culprit wasn’t a bad internet connection, but a flood of DDoS traffic aimed at Adyen, the Amsterdam-based payment processor that handles billions in transactions every year. Engineers fought back, cleared the traffic, and services steadied… until 8:35 p.m., when a second surge arrived. By 11:35 p.m. a third wave was rolling in, turning routine purchases into an exercise in patience.
Why a wobble at Adyen ripples worldwide
Adyen acts as the middleman between tills, apps and banks for giants such as Meta, Uber and eBay. Last year alone it shepherded nearly €1.3 trillion in payments. When its servers choke, queues form from Rotterdam to Reykjavík and online baskets get abandoned. Tuesday’s trading session told the story in numbers: Adyen’s share price slipped more than 2% at the bell.
Counting the cost of minutes
DDoS attacks are blunt instruments as there’s no data theft, just brute congestion. Yet a 30-minute outage can drain sales, trigger angry tweets and push support teams into overdrive. Merchants often learn the hard way that ‘card declined’ flashes faster than brand loyalty.
What can merchants do next time?
- Spread the load. A second gateway or acquiring bank can keep cash flowing if one route jams.
- Automate fail-over. Modern checkout software can switch providers in seconds once error rates spike.
- Filter early. Fast rate-limiting and blocklist filtering stop a chunk of malicious traffic before it reaches the core.
- Drills beat post-mortems. A late-night stresser rehearsal of your incident plan is cheaper than peak-hour chaos.
By 3:30 a.m. most Adyen functions were back; only fringe features lagged into the morning. For a platform processing hundreds of transactions a second, that’s a swift comeback. Still, the episode shows how fragile the last click at checkout can be.
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