Italy experienced significant banking disruptions beginning on November 28, as Nexi users faced widespread issues with card payments and withdrawals. The problems stemmed from service disruptions within Worldline, the French payment processing giant, affecting clients across multiple banks, including BPER, Banco BPM, Unicredit, and Intesa Sanpaolo. By the evening of November 29, the Bank of Italy reported that nearly all services had been restored, although some credit card payment types remained non-operational. Worldline attributed the connectivity issues to damaged cables resulting from local gas line work, although the specific location of the incident was not disclosed.
Just days later, on December 2, further disruptions struck as Intesa Sanpaolo users reported severe technical problems with the bank’s app and Isybank services. Thousands of customers struggled to access their accounts, complete transactions, or view recent account activity, including delayed salary and pension credits. Downdetector.it logged over 7,000 complaints within hours, highlighting a nationwide scope of the issue. As of now, Intesa Sanpaolo has yet to provide a cause for the outages or an estimated resolution time, raising concerns among users about the reliability of electronic banking services in Italy.
These recent events underscore a troubling trend in the banking sector, with multiple institutions experiencing outages that disrupt essential financial services. As reliance on digital banking continues to grow, incidents like these emphasize the need for robust infrastructure and rapid response measures to mitigate service interruptions, ensuring customers can access their funds and conduct transactions seamlessly.
