In mid-February 2026, a ransomware incident targeting payment processor BridgePay Network Solutions created a real-world reminder of a cyber risk many organizations underestimate: operational dependency on a single critical third-party service.

BridgePay’s public incident updates confirmed a ransomware attack, engagement with federal authorities (including the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service forensic team), and that early forensic findings indicated no payment card data was compromised and no evidence of usable data exposure—but also warned that recovery could be lengthy.

Even without confirmed payment card theft, the most immediate impact was blunt and familiar to anyone in local government finance: if residents can’t pay, the system doesn’t just “degrade”—it stops.

What happened with BridgePay (Feb. 11–17)

Reporting described a systemwide outage affecting local government payment services tied to BridgePay, with multiple cities and public-sector entities experiencing credit card payment disruptions.

Examples of this downstream disruption included:

• North Texas cities such as Denton, Coppell, and Frisco, plus utilities like Bryan and San Angelo, reporting outages related to the vendor disruption.
• Denton Municipal Utilities, where residents couldn’t pay with credit/debit cards for days; the city suspended late fees/disconnects for a period and pointed residents to alternative methods like PayPal/Venmo options, eCheck, in-person payments, and kiosks.
• Marietta, Georgia, where officials described a ransomware event involving one of the city’s payment gateway providers and noted it was affecting payment services for hundreds of municipalities—while the city worked to stand up an alternative payment solution.

The real cybersecurity issue: “availability is the breach”

When people hear “ransomware,” they often think first about data theft and breach notifications. But incidents like BridgePay underline a more immediate truth: for many organizations, the biggest impact is not confidentiality—it’s availability.

If residents can’t pay for utilities, taxes, permits, court payments, or other services because the processing rail is down, then the organization experiences a public-facing outage even if internal networks are untouched.

This is why cyber resilience has to be treated as service continuity, not only as IT security.

Why dependency on one processor is so risky

• Operational paralysis: Online portals fail because the back-end gateway is down. Staff scramble to create ad hoc manual processes (slower and more error-prone).
• Cash-flow disruption: Governments and utilities are not “selling convenience.” They’re collecting revenue that funds operations. Delayed collections can snowball into budgeting pressure.
• Public trust erosion: Residents experience it as “my city can’t take payments,” not “a third party was attacked.” Confusing communication can amplify frustration.
• Hidden technical lock-in: Even if an organization wants to switch processors, integrations, contracts, PCI considerations, and billing system limitations can make switching slow.
• Incident response mismatch: Your team may be ready—but if the vendor is down, your readiness doesn’t restore the service.

The Change Healthcare parallel: one attack, months of downstream pain

If BridgePay is a wake-up call for local government payments, the Change Healthcare incident was the national-scale case study for healthcare finance.

In February 2024, a ransomware attack on Change Healthcare—an intermediary deeply embedded in U.S. healthcare transaction flows—triggered widespread operational and financial disruption affecting eligibility checks, claims processing, and payments.

Industry reporting and associations described significant downstream impact on hospitals and physician practices, including prolonged claims backlogs and cash-flow strain that persisted for months.

A key similarity between Change Healthcare and BridgePay is that both sit at the intersection of operations and money movement. When those pipelines stop, the damage compounds daily. Manual workarounds exist, but they are slower, harder to reconcile, and generate administrative burden.

There is also a governance lesson: congressional testimony and reporting around Change Healthcare emphasized that basic control gaps at a critical intermediary can have national consequences.

What local governments (and other sectors) should do now

If your organization depends on a single payment processor or gateway, the takeaway isn’t “never use third parties.” It’s: design your service so that a vendor outage is survivable.

1. Identify and rank your “money flow” single points of failure: Create a dependency map for revenue collection channels, payment portals and gateways, billing systems, integrations, and customer communication channels. Label what truly needs resilience engineering.
2. Improve your Business Impact Assessment (BIA): Update your BIA to include dependencies such as these (or other critical processing, even outside of your control) so that executives and the board have better visibility into the issue.
3. Build “degraded mode” payment operations before the incident: Document manual and alternate payment procedures, call-center scripts, policy triggers (late fees/disconnects), a public status/update cadence, and clear resident instructions so workarounds aren’t invented under pressure.
4. Engineer vendor failover (not just vendor monitoring): Where feasible, maintain an approved backup processor (even if used rarely), document the switch-over process, and test it periodically across technical, finance, and communications teams.
5. Put resilience into contracts and procurement: Security questionnaires aren’t enough. Address incident notification timelines, recovery transparency, evidence of tested restoration procedures, audit rights, and exit/transition provisions.
6. Practice the scenario that actually happens: the vendor is down: Run tabletop exercises where your internal systems are healthy but the vendor is offline for 7–21 days, and leadership tracks revenue/service impacts daily.
7. Communicate like a service provider: Pre-write public guidance (“how to pay right now”), FAQs about what is known/unknown, and a plan for restoring services in priority order to maintain trust.

Bottom line

BridgePay’s ransomware disruption is a current reminder of what Change Healthcare made painfully clear: the most damaging cyber incidents don’t just steal data—they interrupt the flow of money and operations.

If your organization depends on one critical online processor, your security program can’t stop at “Is the vendor secure?” It must also answer:

When the vendor goes dark, how do we keep serving the public—and keep the revenue engine running—without improvising under pressure?

By: Adam John