Unprecedented: Card payments stopped working all across Norway
Massive queues at grocery stores as customers could only pay with cash as card payment terminals all over the country went down.
You might have heard people warn about this kind of thing before, but up until now this really hasn’t happened at this scale before, at least not in Norway.
Card payment terminals all over the country have gone down at the same time, leaving people unable to buy things with their cards.
And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time.
Tomorrow is the 17th of May, the Norwegian constitution day. That is a huge day, almost like 4th of July for Americans. All Norwegians dress up in traditional clothes and march in the streets in massive parades waving the national flag. In fact, it is a very patriotic celebration.
People today are heading to the shops to buy food and everything that they need for the celebrations tomorrow, but disaster has struck.
Shops all across the country are unable to take payments by card as some 130 000 card payment terminals went down today, leaving massive queues at the shops and people only being able to buy with cash. Shops like grocery stores and pharmacies were unable to take card payments. However, it was still possible to make purchases in shops that had backup solutions, which reportedly about half of all shops in Norway have.
People could be seen queuing at ATM machines to take out cash, something that is not a usual sight in Norway in 2022.
The company Nets, who deliver card payment terminals and bank cards wrote on their website that they had problems.
”An ongoing incident is causing failed transactions for online transactions and terminals going through Norway. Investigations are ongoing.”
Pål Andre Fredrikesen, general manager at Verifone in Norway says that the outage is affecting all card terminals in the country.
”We talk about maybe 120 000 to 130 000 terminals. We are practically looking at all terminals in all of Norway”
”I have worked in this sector for 15 years, this is the first time I experience something like this. It is clear that this is the wrong day for something to go down” he said.
However, as I am writing this article, the latest update is that the payment terminals are now back up and running again after several hours of the outage.
It is good news that the terminals are back up and running again, but this shows the downside of a cashless society.
Cashless society in Scandinavia.
You see, in Scandinavia we have come much further than many other countries when it comes to the cashless society.
As I wrote about earlier, in Sweden some 6000 people have already gotten microchip implants in their hands to use for cashless payments, see my article about that here.
And in Norway, it was announced only a few weeks ago that they are getting a new system for digital ID where people can use facial recognition or fingerprint scanning to verify their identity online.
This digital ID is widespread in Norway and almost a must for people to live modern life. You use it for online banking, buying things online and much more. You can even see your vaccination record or covid status by logging in to the government health website with your digital ID!
But this outage today shows the weakness of a cashless society. If the system goes down, it causes chaos. With cash, you will always have physical cash in your hand. If the system goes down, you can still live life like normal.
This is a good reminder for everyone to make sure to at least have some cash available at all times in case something like this happens.
Use cash where ever you are. Advocate for cash. The only thing we can " cheat" with is cash. No one knows what we buy. Any buisness will be bettter off taking cash. Cash you can manipulate with in your accounting, just like the government. You can use cash for moonlight work. Cash is our future. Use cash where ever you can. Small buisness like cash. They can circumvint tax. :) :) The more tax the government gets the more fraud they make.
Coming soon to many other countries! ALWAYS have a stash of cash and a way to barter!