MoneyGram confirms a cyberattack is behind dayslong outage

Money transfer giant MoneyGram has confirmed it suffered a cyberattack after dealing with system outages and customer complaints about lack of service since Friday.

While many suspected the company was hit by a cyberattack, it wasn't until Monday morning that MoneyGram confirmed that a cybersecurity incident caused the systems outage.

"MoneyGram recently identified a cybersecurity issue affecting certain of our systems," reads the announcement.

"Upon detection, we immediately launched an investigation and took protective steps to address it, including proactively taking systems offline, which impacted network connectivity."

MoneyGram is an American peer-to-peer payment and money transfer firm that enables people to send and receive money through an extensive network of 350,000 physical locations in 200 countries or digitally via its mobile app and website.

It is the world's second largest money transfer company, only behind Western Union, processing over 120 million transactions annually from tens of millions of users.

The first signs of a problem appeared on Friday, September 20, when people reported the inability to receive payments or access their money through the service, and the website was unavailable.

After MoneyGram customers could not transfer or access their money, the company said on Saturday that they were experiencing a "network outage" impacting connectivity to their systems.

MoneyGram took to X on Saturday to say they were experiencing a "network outage" impacting connectivity to their systems but did not share any additional details.

The company finally confirmed on Monday that a cybersecurity incident was the cause of the outage, assuring customers that the firm is working diligently with external experts and law enforcement to resolve the situation.

"We recognize the importance and urgency of this matter to our customers and partners. We are working diligently to bring our systems back online and resume normal business operations," explained MoneyGram.

No time estimates have been given for when the systems might return to normal operational status, indicating that they are in the beginning stages or remediating the attack.

While MoneyGram has not shared what type of attack they suffered, the extended outage and loss of connectivity to systems is indicative of a ransomware attack.

Considering MoneyGram's massive customer base, a potential data breach on the company could have far-reaching repercussions for many people.

BleepingComputer has contacted the firm about the attack, and we will update this post as soon as we hear back.