At the end of May, discounters and supermarkets across Germany reported problems with card payments. The error seemed to be fixed after a few days, but now the incident at the drugstore chain dm seems to be repeating itself. In many cities, customers are therefore standing in front of closed branches.
Several branches of the Karlsruhe drugstore chain dm are again reporting problems with their cash registers due to a software glitch. It is currently not known how many markets are affected nationwide. The company also did not say whether the problems were limited to card payments alone or whether the cash registers did not work as a whole, as reported by the "Bild" newspaper. Accordingly, dm had to close branches in several German cities.
Affected customers reported problems on Twitter and other platforms, including from Berlin, Freiburg, Leipzig and Rendsburg in Schleswig-Holstein. In other branches in the same cities, however, operations should run smoothly. "Focus Online" reports that the affected branches cannot connect to the Internet.
Company boss Christoph Werner confirmed the problems on request. "There are currently problems with the cash registers in a number of dm stores due to a software error," he said. At the same time he confidently announced that the cause had been found. The problem will be solved within a very short time, Werner promised.
As early as the end of May, it was not possible to pay by card in large parts of the retail trade throughout Germany. At Aldi Nord, Edeka and Netto, among others, customers were temporarily only able to pay for their purchases in cash. The cause was a software error in a widely used card payment device that had to be replaced.
Officially, the cause of the problem in May is not yet known. The German trade association announced that it would work on the effects of the H5000 terminal type, which is widespread in Germany. The Bundesbank, the financial supervisory authority Bafin, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and partner central banks in the Eurosystem also announced that they wanted to investigate the disruption.
