Merchant account frozen — what to do in the next 4 hours

Hour 1 — confirm what's actually frozen

• Check authorisation rate by MID — if one MID is 0% and others are normal, it's a single-acquirer freeze.
• Check settlement: incoming payouts paused, reserve held, or both?
• Pull the latest TC40/SAFE report — sudden fraud-rule trigger is the most common cause.
• Email and call your account manager. Document everything in writing.

Hour 2 — failover live traffic

If you have a backup MID provisioned with us, this is automatic — our orchestration layer detects the authorisation collapse and shifts traffic. If you don't have a backup yet, we can route you onto a shared MID for emergency continuity within hours while our partner acquirers underwrite a permanent replacement.

Hour 3 — protect cash and customers

• Send customer-facing comms framing the issue as a 'billing system upgrade' — never 'account frozen'. Customer trust drives churn more than the freeze itself.
• Pause non-essential outgoing payments and forecast cash flow against a 90–180 day reserve hold.
• Document the freeze for the next acquirer's underwriting — clean disclosure beats discovered history.

Hour 4 — start replacement underwriting

We pre-flight the replacement application with a sponsor bank we already know will underwrite your MCC. Clean files close in 48–96 hours. We also start the reserve-recovery conversation with the frozen acquirer in parallel — it's a separate workstream and worth running independently.