Whether the system in question is a cloud platform, a payments network or even a blockchain, the five nines, representing 99.999% availability, have become table stakes.
After all, in the early marketing of public blockchains, uptime was treated less as a technical metric than as a philosophical guarantee. Bitcoin, ethereum and their successors were framed as systems that could not be turned off, constrained or meaningfully interrupted. Decentralization itself was the redundancy plan.
For enterprises now considering stablecoin issuance, on-chain treasury management or blockchain-based settlement, that framing has begun to collide with a more prosaic reality. In 2025, downtime on public blockchain infrastructure, like Coinbase’s Base layer-2 blockchain, ceased to be an edge case and instead became an operational variable that finance leaders were increasingly forced to model.
It wasn’t just blockchain, either. This past Saturday (Dec. 20), a widespread PG&E outage cut power to nearly one-third of San Francisco, throwing self-driving and autonomous vehicles into a state of confusion. Autonomous vehicles struggled, not because self-driving technology is inherently flawed, but because it was operating within a broader system that failed.
Similarly, AWS and Cloudflare disruptions in 2025 took large portions of the internet offline, from eCommerce platforms to media sites to crypto services. No serious observer concluded that the internet itself was unreliable or obsolete. Instead, those outages reinforced a familiar lesson: resilience depends on architectural choices, redundancy and dependency management.
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Uptime Emerges as a Design Principle for Digital Payments and Commerce
As businesses look ahead to 2026, the systems that power finance, mobility, commerce and communications are no longer being judged primarily on innovation and capability but on their ability to stay on.
“We had 100% uptime this year. What you want is a Black Friday and not a blackout Friday,” Entersekt Chief Strategy Officer Dewald Nolte said. “Our operations team is absolutely the unsung heroes.”
For firms embracing the five nines of 99.999% uptime, that allows them to be down around just five or so minutes during the course of the year. For payments businesses pushing billions of dollars in transactions, that can represent millions of dollars of lost volume.
“Platform resiliency and business continuity planning, in my opinion, has been our number one unsung hero,” Rinku Sharma, chief technology officer at Boost Payment Solutions, told PYMNTS.
For enterprises, uptime and resiliency trade-offs are unavoidable. Financial institutions have long operated under stringent uptime requirements, not because outages never occur, but because the consequences of failure are systemic.
“We draw the line where innovation would compromise the stability, security or affordability of the customer experience,” Jared Rutkowski, head of payables and receivables at FIS, told PYMNTS.
“Customers want innovation, but they need reliability more,” he added.
See more: The Under-the-Radar Changes Transforming How Money Moves
Mitigating the Impact of Outages Becomes an Operational Reality
What has changed is not the existence of outages, but the expectations surrounding them. In a connected economy, uptime is no longer a feature—it is a prerequisite. The systems most exposed to failure are not necessarily the newest, but the ones whose designers assumed availability rather than engineered for it.
As technologies move from experimental to essential, the tolerance for disruption collapses. Downtime that once could be explained away as the cost of innovation now carries reputational, regulatory and financial consequences. The promise of constant availability has become inseparable from trust itself.
As PYMNTS covered this month, what should have been a Cyber Monday victory lap for Shopify turned into a midday nightmare as merchants worldwide lost access to their admin dashboards and point‑of‑sale systems on one of the busiest online shopping days of the year.
And at the start of 2025, a days-long outage at Capital One locked thousands of customers from their accounts.
These incidents are not unique. Taken together, they present a vivid illustration of a recurring pattern in modern technology failures. Highly sophisticated components are embedded within complex, interdependent systems. When one layer fails, whether it’s power, connectivity or compute, the failure propagates upward.
Finance teams and enterprise IT functions must now ask questions that would have seemed heretical a few years ago: What happens if a network is unavailable for six hours? For a day? What are our fallback procedures? Who bears responsibility?
These questions do not undermine innovation. They professionalize it. Technologies that cannot answer them will struggle to move beyond pilot programs and proofs of concept. Those that can will earn the trust required to operate at scale.
