BridgePay ransomware attack: the February 2026 outage that took down city payment portals, Palm Bay's included

Was the City of Palm Bay hit by ransomware?

No. Palm Bay's own systems were not the target; its card processor was. The city's notice of February 6, 2026, posted at 4:11 PM, says BridgePay Network Solutions, its third-party credit card processing vendor, was having a nationwide service disruption, and that the city's online billing payment portal was unavailable with no estimated restoration time. The city pointed residents to BridgePay's status page for updates. Its notice says nothing about any Palm Bay resident's data being taken, and no breach notice from the city or from BridgePay appears in the records checked for this entry.

While the portal was down, the city listed these ways to pay:

Payment	What Palm Bay accepted during the outage
Utility bills	Cash, check or credit card in person at Building E next to City Hall, 120 Malabar Road; checks through the online and phone portal; check or money order in the City Hall drop boxes
Building Department	Cash or check in person inside Building E
Growth Management and Business Tax Receipts	Check or money order in person at City Hall
Public Works	Check or money order in person inside Building E

What happened at BridgePay, and when?

BridgePay ran the incident on its public status page as "BridgePay Gateway - Outage - Under Investigation", with 17 updates from the first post to the close. The milestones, in the company's own order:

Date (2026)	What BridgePay posted	Source
February 6, 5:48 a.m. ET	Systems in an outage; cause under investigation; no time for resolution	Status page
February 6, 6:34 a.m. ET	A system-wide disruption tied to a cybersecurity incident; working with the FBI	Status page
February 6, noon ET	Working with the U.S. Secret Service forensic team to get clearance to access its systems	Status page
February 6, 7:08 p.m. ET	Confirms a ransomware attack; first findings show no payment card data compromised	Status page
February 11	Hopeful services may be back within the next week	Status page
February 22	Receives its Letter of Compliance after the required security validations	Status page
February 24	Approval from several processors; gateways start coming back in phases	Status page
February 28	All TPI/TGateway gateway instances and the BridgePay Gateway restored	Status page
April 27	Incident marked resolved	Status page

The record lists 15 affected components, among them the BridgePay Gateway API, the PayGuardian Cloud API, the MyBridgePay virtual terminal and reporting portal, the WebLink 3.0 hosted payment page, and BridgePay's phone and email support. So the gateway itself was back 22 days after the first post, but BridgePay said then that some processing partners still had approvals pending.

Was any card or personal data stolen in the BridgePay attack?

BridgePay says no card data was taken. Its update on the evening of February 6 said initial forensic findings showed no payment card data had been compromised, that any files that may have been accessed were encrypted, and that there was no evidence of usable data exposure. The next day it repeated that this "was not a card data breach".

No public breach notice backs or contradicts that. Indiana's 2026 year-to-date breach report has no BridgePay row, and a search of California's breach list for BridgePay returns no notice. (The only Palm Bay name in Indiana's 2026 report is Palm Bay International Inc, a different organization with 13 Indiana residents in a June 2025 breach.) No ransomware group had claimed the attack when The Record reported on it on February 9. That makes this entry an outage record, not a breach notice: what failed was the ability to take card payments.

Which cities and utilities were affected by the BridgePay outage?

BridgePay processes 40 million transactions a month for dozens of local governments and small businesses, The Record reported, and the company has not published a list of affected customers. Public bodies named in the reports checked for this entry:

Place	What was affected	Reported by
Palm Bay, Florida	Online billing payment portal for utilities and city fees	City of Palm Bay; The Record; GovTech
Frisco, Texas	Utility water payments portal	The Record; GovTech
Denton and Coppell, Texas	Credit card payment outages	GovTech
Bryan and San Angelo, Texas	Water utility payment outages	GovTech
Grand Traverse County, Michigan	Payment outage	GovTech
Wisconsin	A municipal campground reservation system	GovTech
Wichita, Kansas	Disruption, resolved on February 10 through its integrating vendor's workaround	GovTech; WaterISAC

GovTech wrote that it was not clear how many cities use BridgePay. WaterISAC, the water sector's information-sharing center, said most of the reported incidents were in Texas, with others in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida, and that the main effect on utilities was that customers could not pay their water bills.

How did Wichita get its payments back first?

By going around BridgePay. Wichita's communications director told GovTech that the city's disruption was resolved on Tuesday, February 10, when its integrating vendor found a workaround, while BridgePay's own systems were still down. WaterISAC used the same example in its advice to utilities: check which payment vendors billing depends on, keep a manual way to take payments, and write incident notification and restoration terms into vendor contracts.

Why one vendor's outage reached so many residents

BridgePay is a back-end gateway built into other companies' billing software, so a city may not deal with it directly. GovTech's report makes the point that this is why one outage showed up in many jurisdictions at once. The same pattern runs through this log's vendor cases, where one supplier's incident turns into many customers' notices; the vendor breach notice guide shows how those letters name the vendor. For cities hit directly by ransomware, and what they told residents, see the local government breach notice guide, the Winona County, Minnesota attack and the City of Modesto attack.

Should I do anything if I paid a bill through BridgePay?

BridgePay's position is that card data was not compromised, and no breach letter about this attack appears in the state records checked here. If a city or utility you pay sends a letter about it later, it will say what was involved; the payment card breach notice guide explains what those letters usually offer and what to check on a card statement.

What the record leaves open

• Which ransomware group was behind the attack, and how it got in.
• How many cities, utilities and merchants lost card payments, and for how long each.
• Whether BridgePay was asked for or paid a ransom.
• Why the status page incident stayed open from February 28 until April 27, 2026.