Nationwide outage affecting card payments in stores

A nationwide outage is affecting debit card payments in stores in the Netherlands on Thursday, with many payments failing to process. There are also problems with withdrawals from Geldmaat ATMs, De Telegraaf reports.

Complaints of payment failures started coming in on Allestoringen.nl at around 11:30 a.m. In the hour since the site has received thousands of reports.

Something is wrong somewhere in the transaction processors, a spokesperson for the Dutch Payments Association told the newspaper.

When asked about reported problems with Geldmaat withdrawals, the spokesperson said it uses an entirely different system. It may be that so many people are trying to withdraw money simultaneously due to the problem with debit card payments that the Geldmaat systems are getting overloaded.