When a payment service provider (PSP) fails to meet its Service Level Agreement (SLA), the impact goes far beyond legal clauses or monthly reports. It’s a direct hit to merchant revenue, customer trust, and competitive positioning.

And in e-commerce, anything less than 99.999% uptime – known in the industry as “five nines”— simply doesn’t cut it anymore.

SLA Breaches: more than just downtime

Every second of outage is a lost opportunity. For global merchants operating across time zones, a five-minute disruption during a peak sales window can mean:

• Thousands in missed transactions
• Increased cart abandonment
• Long-term loss of customer loyalty
• Damage to brand reputation

It’s not just about being offline—it’s about being unreliable.

That’s why merchants are no longer impressed by promises of uptime—they’re comparing providers based on real-world performance.

Why Five Nines is the new baseline

Five nines equals less than 5 minutes of downtime per year. Reaching that benchmark is tough, but necessary.

For modern PSPs, uptime isn’t a bragging point. It’s the minimum requirement to compete.

And yet, not every provider is prepared. SLA breaches are often the result of outdated infrastructure, poor observability, and a lack of preparedness for high-load conditions. In contrast, leading PSPs make reliability a core pillar of their architecture.

What reliability looks like

To truly honor SLA commitments, PSPs must go beyond paperwork and invest in infrastructure that holds up under pressure.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

✅ Real-time performance monitoring
Instant detection of anomalies across the entire payment stack.

✅ Auto-scaling cloud environments
Dynamic capacity handling during peak transaction volumes.

✅ Geo-redundant, distributed systems
Multiple failover-ready environments ensure business continuity.

✅ Transparent status communication
Merchant-facing dashboards and proactive incident reporting to build trust.

In short: visibility and preparedness at every level.

SLAs as a business growth tool

Merchants don’t just want a payment processor—they want a partner they can trust at scale.

SLAs are no longer just legal guarantees. They’re part of the sales pitch.

Reliable uptime leads to better merchant retention, stronger referrals, and increased credibility in competitive RFPs. In other words, SLA compliance is a business development asset.

The future belongs to the reliable

At Maksu, we don’t treat SLAs as a checkbox. We engineer our infrastructure to exceed them. That’s why we’ve built a next-gen PSP platform that delivers:

✅ True five nines availability

✅ Multi-region redundancy

✅ Real-time monitoring and proactive support

✅ Transparent reporting and merchant communication

Because in the payments world, reliability is spelled in nines and we believe merchants deserve nothing less.

Looking for a payment partner who takes uptime as seriously as you do? Let’s connect.