Status: Resolved
We’re currently experiencing a service disruption affecting the Spot app and card transactions.
Customers may experience issues with:
• Card payments (physical and virtual)
• Wallet transfers
• Balance retrieval
• In-app transactions
This disruption is linked to a broader cloud infrastructure outage impacting multiple services in the region. We are working closely with our infrastructure partners to restore full functionality as quickly and safely as possible.
We understand how frustrating this is — especially when it affects access to your money. Please know this is our highest priority, and our technical teams remain actively engaged until service is fully restored.
We will share further updates here as soon as we have confirmed resolution.
We sincerely apologise for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.
Incident History & Updates
01 Mar 2026 – 18:00 SAST
We began experiencing widespread transaction failures affecting card payments, wallet transfers, balance checks and in-app transactions.
01 Mar 2026 – 18:30 SAST
Initial investigation indicated a regional cloud infrastructure issue impacting our banking and card processing partner in the Middle East.
01 Mar 2026 – 19:00 SAST
Our processing partner confirmed an AWS MEA (Middle East & Africa) production outage impacting payment authorisations and API services.
02 Mar 2026 – 00:00–12:00 SAST
Engineering teams continued working with AWS to reroute traffic to alternative availability zones. Brief intermittent improvements were observed, but transaction failures and high latency persisted.
02 Mar 2026 – 18:00 SAST
Formal incident notification confirmed continued AWS MEA region outage affecting Mastercard authorisations and API connectivity. Status remained “In Progress.”
03 Mar 2026 – 08:00 SAST
Services remain materially impacted. Customers may continue to experience:
- Failed or declined card payments
- Delays in wallet transfers
- Balance retrieval issues
- Slow or failed in-app transactions
Recovery efforts are ongoing in coordination with our infrastructure and payment partners. We will update this page as soon as full stability has been confirmed.
03 Mar 2026 – 14:00 SAST
Spot engineering teams continued monitoring transaction flows and API performance. Some customers experienced intermittent responses, but overall transaction reliability remained degraded due to high latency from upstream payment processing systems.
03 Mar 2026 – 20:00 SAST
Our payment processing partner confirmed they were operating in disaster recovery mode while working with AWS engineers to stabilise infrastructure within the Middle East region.
04 Mar 2026 – 08:30 SAST
Spot deployed backend improvements to better handle high-latency responses from upstream services. These changes improved balance retrieval speeds in some cases, although delays and intermittent failures continued.
04 Mar 2026 – 12:00 SAST
Additional engineering adjustments were made to optimise API connections used for wallet transfers and payment processing.
04 Mar 2026 – 17:30 SAST
Following these changes, response times for some transaction types improved significantly, reducing peak latency from over 130 seconds to approximately 10–15 seconds. Intermittent delays remained while upstream infrastructure instability persisted.
05 Mar 2026 – 10:00 SAST
Further performance improvements were implemented to reduce long-running transaction requests impacting wallet loading and partner integrations.
05 Mar 2026 – 15:00 SAST
Transaction latency continued to improve following backend updates, allowing certain third-party payment integrations to resume normal processing.
06 Mar 2026 – 09:00 SAST
Monitoring continued across transaction services. While improvements remained in place, intermittent timeouts and delays persisted due to ongoing infrastructure instability at our partner’s hosting environment.
06 Mar 2026 – 16:30 SAST
Our payment processing partner confirmed plans to migrate affected infrastructure from the AWS Middle East region to AWS European infrastructure to restore full stability.
07 Mar 2026 – 11:00 SAST
Engineering teams continued working with our partner to prepare for the infrastructure migration. Internal monitoring remained in place to manage customer experience while upstream systems stabilised.
07 Mar 2026 – 19:00 SAST
Testing and operational preparations for the infrastructure migration were completed between Spot and our partners.
08 Mar 2026 – 13:00 SAST
Final coordination continued between Spot, our payment processing partner and infrastructure providers ahead of the planned migration to European infrastructure.
08 Mar 2026 – 20:30 SAST
Customers may still experience intermittent delays while preparations for the infrastructure migration are completed.
09 Mar 2026 – 09:00 SAST
Spot and partner engineering teams remain engaged in final preparations for the migration of payment processing infrastructure to the AWS Europe region.
This migration is expected to resolve the underlying infrastructure dependency responsible for the disruption.
Further updates will be provided once the migration is completed and services have stabilised.
10 Mar 2026 – 06:00 SAST
Following the overnight migration of payment processing systems from the AWS Middle East region to European infrastructure (Frankfurt), the majority of Spot services were observed to be operating normally again.
Initial verification confirmed the following services functioning successfully:
• Balance retrieval
• Transfers between accounts
• Transfers in and out of shared accounts
• Retrieving virtual and physical card details
• Setting PIN for virtual and physical cards
• EFT payments
• Product purchases
Latency across transaction processing systems improved significantly following the migration.
10 Mar 2026 – 10:45 SAST
Further verification confirmed that additional services were operating normally following the migration.
These included:
• Wallet loading
• Wallet creation
• Online purchases using the Spot card
• Updating user details
• Freezing virtual cards
• Zapper scan-to-pay transactions
• Peer-to-peer transactions
Transaction processing latencies remained stable and significantly improved compared to the previous week.
10 Mar 2026 – 13:30 SAST
All core transaction services are now operating normally following the successful migration of payment processing systems to European infrastructure.
Monitoring indicates that response times have returned to expected levels. A small number of internal services continue to be finalised by our partner, but these do not affect customer transactions.
The service disruption banner will be removed shortly as systems continue to operate normally.