Skip to main content

Payment Outages Threaten $44.4 Billion in US Retail and Hospitality Sales Annually

US Businesses Average Over 5 Major Outages Annually, with 63% Occurring During Critical Peak Trading Times

Payment system failures are putting $44.4 billion in US retail and hospitality sales at risk each year, underscoring how quickly disruption can derail day-to-day trading, according to research conducted by FreedomPay and Dynatrace in partnership with Retail Economics.

The report, Payment Resilience in an Uncertain World - USA, highlights the increasing frequency and impact of these disruptions on day-to-day trading, with consumers exhibiting low tolerance for delays. The findings show that payment failures are no longer isolated incidents, but part of a recurring operational challenge that disrupts service, damages customer trust, and negatively impacts revenue. US businesses are reporting an average of over five major outages each year, with 63% occurring during peak trading periods, amplifying the financial impact.

"Consumer-facing businesses in the US are navigating an increasingly treacherous landscape," said Chris Kronenthal, President at FreedomPay. "From widespread outages and connectivity issues to the fragility of existing payment infrastructure, disruption has become a constant. This environment creates a perfect storm for significant revenue loss and long-term damage to customer loyalty and brand reputation."

Key findings from the study include:

  • Ongoing Annual Losses and Frequency: Payment system failures are putting a staggering $44.4 billion in US retail and hospitality sales at risk each year. US businesses average over five payment disruptions annually, with 63% occurring during critical peak trading hours.
  • Patience Gap Drives Revenue Loss: Consumers will wait just 7 minutes before abandoning a purchase, yet the average outage drags on for two hours. Once the patience runs out, losses escalate fast and US businesses forfeit roughly $1.2 billion in sales per minute between minutes 8 and 13. By the 23-minute mark, cumulative losses can hit $5.3 billion, wiping out 70% of all at-risk revenue.
  • Vulnerable Without Reliable Fallbacks: With less than 30% of US consumers consistently carrying cash, and 15% of businesses lacking any secure digital payment backups, merchants are left highly exposed when digital systems fail.
  • Reputational and Human Impact: Beyond financial impact, payment failures expose brands to significant reputational damage among digitally savvy consumers and contribute to 60% of managers reporting verbal abuse towards frontline staff.

"This research shows that payment disruption becomes a business problem long before it is uncovered as a technical one," said Philippe Deblois, Global VP of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace. "When payment systems fail, time is the most expensive variable. In complex environments, delays happen when teams can't quickly see where a problem starts or how systems are connected. Customers don't wait for that clarity. They leave, and revenue is lost within minutes."

"Our research shows that the financial impact of payment outages is significant, but the erosion of consumer trust and brand loyalty can cause equally devastating damage," said Richard Lim, CEO at Retail Economics. "Investing in robust payment infrastructure and the ability to proactively observe potential points of failure is essential for safeguarding future growth, maintaining a competitive edge, and prioritizing long-term consumer preference."

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

Payment Outages Threaten $44.4 Billion in US Retail and Hospitality Sales Annually

US Businesses Average Over 5 Major Outages Annually, with 63% Occurring During Critical Peak Trading Times

Payment system failures are putting $44.4 billion in US retail and hospitality sales at risk each year, underscoring how quickly disruption can derail day-to-day trading, according to research conducted by FreedomPay and Dynatrace in partnership with Retail Economics.

The report, Payment Resilience in an Uncertain World - USA, highlights the increasing frequency and impact of these disruptions on day-to-day trading, with consumers exhibiting low tolerance for delays. The findings show that payment failures are no longer isolated incidents, but part of a recurring operational challenge that disrupts service, damages customer trust, and negatively impacts revenue. US businesses are reporting an average of over five major outages each year, with 63% occurring during peak trading periods, amplifying the financial impact.

"Consumer-facing businesses in the US are navigating an increasingly treacherous landscape," said Chris Kronenthal, President at FreedomPay. "From widespread outages and connectivity issues to the fragility of existing payment infrastructure, disruption has become a constant. This environment creates a perfect storm for significant revenue loss and long-term damage to customer loyalty and brand reputation."

Key findings from the study include:

  • Ongoing Annual Losses and Frequency: Payment system failures are putting a staggering $44.4 billion in US retail and hospitality sales at risk each year. US businesses average over five payment disruptions annually, with 63% occurring during critical peak trading hours.
  • Patience Gap Drives Revenue Loss: Consumers will wait just 7 minutes before abandoning a purchase, yet the average outage drags on for two hours. Once the patience runs out, losses escalate fast and US businesses forfeit roughly $1.2 billion in sales per minute between minutes 8 and 13. By the 23-minute mark, cumulative losses can hit $5.3 billion, wiping out 70% of all at-risk revenue.
  • Vulnerable Without Reliable Fallbacks: With less than 30% of US consumers consistently carrying cash, and 15% of businesses lacking any secure digital payment backups, merchants are left highly exposed when digital systems fail.
  • Reputational and Human Impact: Beyond financial impact, payment failures expose brands to significant reputational damage among digitally savvy consumers and contribute to 60% of managers reporting verbal abuse towards frontline staff.

"This research shows that payment disruption becomes a business problem long before it is uncovered as a technical one," said Philippe Deblois, Global VP of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace. "When payment systems fail, time is the most expensive variable. In complex environments, delays happen when teams can't quickly see where a problem starts or how systems are connected. Customers don't wait for that clarity. They leave, and revenue is lost within minutes."

"Our research shows that the financial impact of payment outages is significant, but the erosion of consumer trust and brand loyalty can cause equally devastating damage," said Richard Lim, CEO at Retail Economics. "Investing in robust payment infrastructure and the ability to proactively observe potential points of failure is essential for safeguarding future growth, maintaining a competitive edge, and prioritizing long-term consumer preference."

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...