Germany has been hit by a nationwide disruption to card payments, authorities said on Thursday, with an IT service provider responsible for the problem.
Both debit and credit cards have been affected since the early morning, although cash machines appear to be working as normal.
A cyberattack can be ruled out based on current knowledge, said a spokesman for the German Banking Industry Committee, an association for the country's banking industry.
The disruption is attributed to problems with First Data, an IT service provider owned by the US group Fiserv, a company spokesman said. The firm is working hard to fix the issue and will let its customers know as soon as possible, he added.
Oh, thanks for sharing! I was about to go outside to buy some stuff. Will make sure I have enough cash on me. Might be funny to watch in the stores when people don’t. But paying with cash is quite common in Germany.
I had forgotten about the Monolith card. LOL. I have just checked their website and have found this:
Dearest Monolith Customer,
We would like to announce the closure of Monolith’s services, effective on 8th October 2024. This marks an end of an era, however, our journey is far from over.
Reasons for this Decision
The increasing regulatory requirements in the EU and UK make it challenging to keep Monolith operational without significant investment.
We are preparing for the global rollout of Monolith’s successor, Token.com, a mass-market consumer crypto platform summarised as “TikTok for Tokens.”
They speak because they are closed and centralized systems, they don't have the nature of bitcoin, it may be slow in processing transactions but its resilience far exceeds any financial system. Oh and lightning solves the problem of slow transaction processing. So anything that functions as the closed and centralized fiat model is prone to these kinds of problems.
Coincidentally The Chancellor is mentioned in the Genesis Block