Major disruption: card payments paralyzed in Germany

Major disruption: card payments paralyzed in Germany

On Thursday, April 4th, a major card payment disruption was reported in Germany. Customers of various banks such as Sparkasse, Commerzbank and the Volks- und Raiffeisenbanks had difficulties making cashless payments. The fault indicators for almost all banks had recorded strong fluctuations since the early hours of the morning.

A spokeswoman for the savings bank confirmed that the error had been fixed during the morning. However, problems continued to arise with card payments in various locations. Commerzbank also announced problems as a result of the disruption. The exact number of banks and cards affected was still unclear at the time of reporting.

According to the fault reporter “alletreibung.de”, over 1,100 disruptions were reported for the Sparkasse alone on Thursday morning. There were also strong disruption reports in the morning at Commerzbank and Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken, but to a lesser extent compared to Sparkasse. It was pointed out that despite the bank resolving the disruption, further problems could not be ruled out during the day.

The technical problems with card payments were attributed to an internal encryption process that was causing disruptions. While Sparkasse reported problems at the national level, Commerzbank said it had not identified any Germany-wide disruption. It was not clear at the time whether other services besides card payments were also affected. Customers were unable to pay with debit cards, but some were able to use credit cards.

It was only in 2022 that there were days of outages in card payments with debit and debit cards in Germany due to problems with card reading terminals. Both Visa and Maestro cards were affected by the disruption, which meant that in some stores only cash payments were possible.