On November 18th, the global internet experienced one of the most significant disruptions in recent years due to a widespread Cloudflare outage. Numerous online services—from payment systems to social networks such as Twitter, ChatGPT, Spotify, Uber, Canva and news & media sites —were unreachable for hours. In this challenging environment, Monri Payments engeenering team worked around the clock to ensure that critical national services in countries across Europe continued operating without interruption.
Below is a transparent overview of how the outage affected us, how we responded, and what we are doing to further strengthen our resilience for the future.
How the Outage Affected Monri Payments
Like many other companies worldwide, Monri Payments relies on Cloudflare infrastructure for traffic routing, DNS resolution, and security services. When Cloudflare experienced severe service degradation, several Monri components were affected—particularly those depending on Cloudflare’s DNS systems.
This led to a situation in which part of the processing infrastructure was reachable, but DNS resolution through Cloudflare was not, preventing some terminals and online services from establishing connections to our systems.
For most payment providers, this scenario would have meant complete operational downtime.
Our Immediate Response: Restoring Payment Processing
To maintain continuous payment processing—especially for critical national services such as the Croatian highway toll system—our engineering and operations teams deployed an emergency mitigation within minutes.
Direct IP Routing for POS Terminals
We temporarily rerouted POS terminals to communicate directly with the Monri Payments processing IP address.
This solution allowed us to:
• Restore continentwide POS transaction processing, including at toll stations.
• Ensure uninterrupted payment capability during a period when large portions of the global internet were offline.
• Maintain business continuity for merchants relying on Monri, both in retail and high-traffic travel/tourism sectors.
This workaround, while effective, required us to temporarily accept reduced DDoS protection, since Cloudflare’s layer of security was bypassed by necessity.
Despite that increased exposure, our infrastructure remained stable, protected, and fully operational throughout the outage.
Impact on Croatian Critical Services
One of the most important outcomes of our rapid response was that the national highway toll system continued operating without interruption.
Had Monri not implemented the emergency routing plan, highway toll stations across the country could have faced significant downtime—blocking traffic, harming revenue, and disrupting national transport services.
Instead, transactions were processed normally, even while much of the world struggled with the outage.
Post-Incident Improvements: Strengthening Our DNS Resilience
While our systems remained operational, this incident highlighted a global dependency on a small number of infrastructure providers. To further reduce risk and eliminate single points of failure, we have already initiated improvements to our core infrastructure.
Introducing an Additional DNS Resolver
We are expanding our DNS architecture by adding an additional resolver with full failover logic.
Once complete, Monri Payments will have:
• Two independent DNS resolution paths
• Automatic failover in case one provider becomes unavailable
• Reduced dependency on any single global DNS operator
• Faster recovery time during future large-scale internet outages
This enhancement will significantly improve resilience for all merchants, partners, and integrated financial systems.
Commitment to Reliability
Incidents of this scale remind us how interconnected today’s digital infrastructure is—and how essential resilience and preparedness are for modern payment ecosystems.
At Monri Payments, our priority is clear:
Ensure reliable, secure, and uninterrupted payment processing, especially when the unexpected occurs.
We are proud that even during one of the most disruptive global outages in recent memory, our teams kept critical services running and demonstrated the strength, flexibility, and expertise behind our infrastructure.
We will continue investing in improvements, testing failover strategies, and enhancing our systems to maintain the highest level of reliability for merchants and consumers across the region.
