Cyberattacks disrupt card banking services at three major Iranian banks

Cyberattacks knocked card-based banking services offline at Bank Melli, Bank Saderat and Bank Tejarat, interrupting the systems Iranians use for wages, purchases and cash access while cybersecurity teams tried to restore normal operations. Iran’s state-owned banking technology provider said the temporary suspension was meant to prevent further unauthorized access.

The disruption reached beyond a single channel. The affected functions included ATMs, point-of-sale terminals and mobile applications tied to card processing, meaning the outage hit everyday payment infrastructure rather than a narrow back-office system. In a country where many routine transactions depend on bank cards, the breakdown immediately threatened retail commerce, fuel purchases and small-business payments, while also shaking confidence in basic financial services.

Iranian authorities did not publicly assign blame for the latest attack at the time of reporting. The silence stands out against the backdrop of earlier accusations from Iranian officials, who have previously blamed hostile foreign actors, including Israel, for similar cyber incidents. Israel has not commented on those accusations.

The latest outage came only about nine days after another cyberattack struck Iran’s banking network on June 14, 2026. That earlier disruption hit four major banks, Bank Melli, Bank Saderat, Bank Tejarat and the Export Development Bank of Iran, after attackers targeted shared communications infrastructure used by the lenders. Iranian officials said no customer data was compromised in that incident, and recovery reportedly took several days.

Esmaeil Ariani, head of Iran’s Informatics Services Corporation, said problems affecting card services at Bank Tejarat and Bank Saderat had been fully fixed and transactions had resumed, even as work continued elsewhere in the system. Other reports said restoration was still underway across the affected banks, underscoring how uneven the recovery remained.

The back-to-back disruptions have renewed questions about how resilient Iran’s financial plumbing is under pressure and whether banks have enough redundancy to keep essential consumer services running when one shared layer is compromised. When card systems fail twice in less than two weeks, the impact is not just technical. It lands in payroll delays, checkout lines and the broader strain of keeping daily life moving inside a banking system that appears exposed at its most basic points.