I cannot comprehend the impact if someone like VISA went down like this for the same amount of time. I feel like you might be getting what you are paying for with those merchant fees. They seem like extortion until you get a chance to take a tour through the fully-staffed command center and get to see just how much pain & suffering that real, live humans go through 24/7/365 to ensure the payment network is stable.
During my time working for Pulse (now part of Discover), I was expected to respond to a network outage within 60 seconds. Like, on the phone having a conversation with the bank's IT team. Anything going beyond 5 minutes would be escalated to a multi-party bridge call that doesn't end until everything is green again. The notion that the entire payment network could be down for more than a few hours is unimaginable at the scale of an organization like Visa, Amex or Discover.