BridgePay Confirms Ransomware Attack Behind Outage
BridgePay Confirms Ransomware Attack Behind Outage 🚨
A major U.S. payment gateway and solutions provider, BridgePay, has confirmed that a ransomware attack has knocked key systems offline, triggering a widespread outage affecting multiple services. The incident began on Friday and quickly escalated into a nationwide disruption across BridgePay’s platform.
In an update posted on February 6, the company stated that it has engaged federal law enforcement, including the FBI and U.S. Secret Service, along with external forensic and recovery teams. Initial forensic findings indicate that no payment card data has been compromised, and any accessed files were encrypted, with currently no evidence of usable data exposure.
Around the same time BridgePay disclosed the incident, several U.S. merchants and organizations began informing customers that they could only accept cash due to the nationwide card-processing outage. The City of Palm Bay, Florida government announced: “BridgePay Network Solutions, our third-party credit card processing vendor, is experiencing a nationwide service disruption. As a result, the City’s online billing payment portal is currently unavailable. We do not have an estimated restoration time.”
Other organizations, including Lightspeed Commerce, ThriftTrac, and the City of Frisco, Texas, have reported service impacts from the BridgePay incident. BridgePay’s status page showed major outages across core production systems, including:
- BridgePay Gateway API (BridgeComm)
- PayGuardian Cloud API
- MyBridgePay virtual terminal and reporting
- Hosted payment pages
- PathwayLink gateway and boarding portals
Early warning signs appeared around 3:29 a.m., when monitoring detected degraded performance across multiple services, beginning with the “Gateway.Itstgate.com - virtual terminal, reporting, API” systems. The intermittent service degradation eventually cascaded into a full system outage.
As of the latest update, BridgePay stated that recovery could take time and is being handled “in a secure and responsible manner,” while the company continues its forensic investigation. This incident adds to a growing wave of ransomware attacks targeting payment infrastructure, where outages can quickly ripple through real-world commerce when transaction pipelines go down.