Adyen, a global payment platform, recently fell victim to a Distributed-Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack on April 21, 2025, causing disruptions to services for numerous customers throughout Europe. The attack resulted in significant delays and failures in processing transactions, shedding light on the increasing threat posed by cyberattacks targeting critical financial infrastructure.
The cyber assault on Adyen commenced at 18:51 CEST on April 21, triggering unusual levels of errors and sluggish responses across various payment services hosted in European data centers. Adyen’s engineering team promptly launched an investigation and pinpointed the disruption as a DDoS attack.
A DDoS attack overwhelms a system with a flood of traffic from multiple sources, hindering the processing of legitimate requests. Adyen encountered three distinct waves of attack, necessitating real-time adjustments to their mitigation strategies.
Tom Adams, CTO of Adyen, revealed that the attack produced millions of requests per minute, originating from a globally distributed and constantly shifting set of IP addresses. This inundation led to the saturation of critical infrastructure components, resulting in intermittent availability of some services.
Impacted services during the cyberattack included E-commerce, In-Person Payment Transaction processing, Customer Area, Hosted Onboarding, Transfer API, and various checkout services. These disruptions led to failed or delayed transactions for a portion of Adyen’s customer base, disrupting normal business operations relying on the platform for real-time payments.
In response to the attack, Adyen’s response team swiftly enacted mitigation protocols, such as anti-DDoS protections, system capacity enhancement, and targeted filtering to block malicious traffic. Despite these efforts, services operated below normal standards for several hours due to the evolving attack nature.
The incident was officially resolved by 03:20 CEST on April 22, nearly nine hours after the cyberattack commenced. Throughout the ordeal, Adyen kept customers informed through regular updates on impact and resolution progress.
Adyen’s CTO, Tom Adams, acknowledged the severity of the incident and reiterated the company’s commitment to reliability and transparency. A comprehensive post-incident review is underway, aiming to prevent similar incidents in the future by analyzing the root cause and implementing long-term strategies.
As digital financial service providers face escalating challenges in maintaining uninterrupted service against evolving cyber threats, the resilience and security of platforms like Adyen become vital expectations in the digital payment landscape.
The Cyber Express team attempted to obtain further information from Adyen regarding the cyberattack and precautionary measures but has not received a response. Updates will be provided as soon as additional details are received.