Open Banking Gateway - Major Outage

Incident Report for Salt Edge

Postmortem

Executive summary

Incident Summary

On 19 May 2026, Salt Edge identified an operational issue affecting one of the backend components supporting the Open Banking Gateway platform. Given the potential impact on platform stability, our Infrastructure team initiated immediate infrastructure stabilisation work.

Before issuing this report, Salt Edge completed a detailed internal review covering the incident timeline, customer impact, technical behaviour, remediation measures, and follow-up actions.

The infrastructure adjustment had been validated prior to production rollout. However, under live production workload and component synchronization conditions, the affected service behaved differently than expected following restart. This resulted in temporary processing errors and several short periods of service degradation.

Salt Edge’s monitoring tools supported early identification of the issue and enabled the Infrastructure team to track the affected component closely throughout the remediation period. This helped contain the impact, avoid broader platform degradation, and minimise the effect on Open Banking Gateway processing.

During the remediation window, parts of the Open Banking Gateway processing flow experienced intermittent interruptions. The most material impact occurred on 21 May 2026, between 12:23 UTC and 13:32 UTC.

The incident was fully resolved on 22 May 2026.

Salt Edge confirms that:

  • No data loss was identified.
  • No financial inconsistencies were detected.
  • The issue was not caused by any client-side integration, configuration, or API change.
  • No client-side action is required.

The incident has been reviewed by the relevant technical teams, and additional preventive measures are being applied to further strengthen platform resilience under comparable production workload conditions.

Incident overview

   
Incident period 19 May 2026 - 21 May 2026
Main impact window 21 May 2026, 12:23 - 13:32 UTC
Impact Temporary degradation of some Open Banking Gateway flows
Affected services Account Information API Payments API Partners API
Current Status Fully resolved

What Happened

On 19 May 2026, Salt Edge identified an operational issue affecting one of the backend components supporting Open Banking Gateway services. Given the potential impact on service stability, our engineering team initiated immediate infrastructure stabilisation measures to contain the risk and preserve platform continuity.

This was not a standard scheduled maintenance activity. The intervention was required to reduce the risk of broader service instability and to maintain controlled operation of the affected environment.

The infrastructure change had been validated before being applied to production. However, under live production workload and component synchronisation conditions, the affected service required more time than expected to return to full availability following restart.

Salt Edge’s monitoring tools supported early detection of the issue and enabled the engineering team to track the affected component closely throughout the remediation period. This helped contain the impact, prevent broader platform degradation, and minimise the effect on Open Banking Gateway processing.

During the remediation period, certain Open Banking Gateway processing flows experienced temporary degradation. As a result, some requests were not processed successfully on the first attempt, while some background processing was delayed or retried automatically.

Following further technical assessment, Salt Edge paused the remaining rollout activities and prepared an additional stabilisation package. To minimise customer impact, the final package was applied during an early morning low-traffic maintenance window on 22 May 2026. Once the maintenance window was completed, Open Banking Gateway services returned to stable operation.

The incident was not related to any client-side integration, API change, request format, credentials, or client-side configuration. Timeline (UTC):

Time Event
19 May 2026 An operational issue was identified in one of the backend components used by Open Banking Gateway services.
19 May 2026 Due to the potential impact on service stability, stabilisation infrastructure work was started
19 May 2026 11:46 UTC Infrastructure changes were applied to part of the Open Banking Gateway infrastructure.
19 May 2026 11:48 UTC First application errors were observed. Short service degradation was observed.
19 May 2026 11:57 UTC Affected application processing services were fixed.
19 May 2026 12:24 UTC A second iteration was performed. The team fixed affected processing services immediately to avoid a longer unstable state
21 May 2026 12:23 - 13:32 UTC Main impact window. Open Banking Gateway services experienced temporary processing errors. The services: Account Information and Payment Initiation-related flows were affected.
21 May 2026 Following technical assessment, Salt Edge determined that the updated component should not remain in production without additional stabilisation. The team therefore prepared and applied a final stabilisation package to restore normal service behaviour and ensure continued platform reliability.
22 May 2026 02:36 - 02:57 UTC
The fixing package has been applied during the maintenance window.

Root Cause

The root cause was a variance between the component’s expected behaviour in pre-production validation and its behaviour under live production workload during restart and synchronisation.

While the change had been validated before rollout, production-specific workload conditions exposed an availability delay in the affected backend component. As a result, the component required additional time to become fully operational, temporarily impacting dependent Open Banking Gateway processing flows.

This led to intermittent processing errors until the component was stabilised and normal service behaviour was restored.

Resolution

The immediate priority was to stabilise the affected services, contain the impact, and prevent broader platform degradation. Salt Edge paused any further rollout of the updated component, completed an additional technical assessment, and prepared a stabilised version for production deployment.

The stabilisation package was completed on 21 May 2026. To minimise customer impact, it was applied during an early morning low-traffic maintenance window on 22 May 2026. Following the deployment, the affected services returned to stable operation.

Detection

The issue was detected through internal monitoring, application error tracking, and engineering checks during the corrective work. After the first signs of instability were identified, our team started investigation and mitigation immediately.

Corrective & Preventive Measures

We have initiated the following actions to prevent recurrence:

  1. Safer rollout procedure for backend infrastructure components.
    We will improve the rollout process for backend components used by critical services, including clearer checkpoints before continuing from one stage to another.
  2. Additional validation before production rollout.
    We will add stricter validation checks before applying package-level changes to critical production components.
  3. Long-term platform improvement.
    We will continue reviewing long-term improvements for the backend processing layer used by our services.

Contact

If you have any questions about this incident or need assistance with affected transactions, please contact your account manager or reach out to our support team.

We remain committed to providing reliable payment services and appreciate your continued partnership.

This report is intended for authorized partners only. Please do not distribute externally.

Posted May 26, 2026 - 08:46 UTC

Resolved

The services are now operating normally. Our team continues to monitor the system to ensure stability.

Incident duration:
From May 21st, 12:23 in UTC
Until May 21st, 13:32 in UTC

Maintenance work will be scheduled to further mitigate the issue in about 12 hours, and an announcement about it will be published shortly.

A detailed postmortem containing all relevant information will also be published.

We appreciate your patience and understanding.
Posted May 21, 2026 - 15:23 UTC

Monitoring

A fix has been implemented and services are recovering.

We are currently monitoring the system to ensure that the Open Banking Gateway is operating normally.

Customers may experience minor delays while the system fully stabilizes.

We will confirm once the incident is fully resolved.
Posted May 21, 2026 - 13:38 UTC

Identified

We have identified the cause of the issue affecting the Open Banking Gateway.

At this time, customers may still experience failed requests.

Our team is implementing mitigation measures to restore full functionality.

We will continue to provide updates as progress is made.
Posted May 21, 2026 - 13:02 UTC

Update

We are continuing to investigate this issue.
Posted May 21, 2026 - 13:00 UTC

Investigating

We are currently investigating an issue affecting Open Banking Gateway.

Customers may experience failed requests.
The issue started at approximately May 21st, 12:23 in UTC.

Our engineering team is actively investigating the cause and working to restore normal operation as quickly as possible.

Next update will be provided as soon as more information becomes available.
Posted May 21, 2026 - 12:44 UTC
This incident affected: Open Banking Gateway (Account Information API, Payments API, Partners API).