Just a heads-up from Denmark: card payments went completely down last night, and it wasn’t just a local glitch. Stores all over the country were affected—POS terminals dead, ATMs offline, even online transactions failed in some cases.
The payment provider Nets has confirmed the outage, but says they still don’t know what caused it. According to their statement, there’s no sign of terrorism or foreign interference—just a mysterious, wide-scale failure in the core infrastructure.
Zettle also reported a "major outage" for card processing in Denmark around the same time. Everything was back online within before midnight, but the incident left a lot of people (and businesses) stranded, unable to pay or be paid.
This is one of the most cashless countries in the world, and it really showed how brittle the system can be. No clear cause. No clear prevention. Just… silence and fallback to cash (for those who had any).
I didn’t listen to the accompanying podcast so I might be missing some details.
It strikes me that it seems like 37signals are just using AWS as a glorified virtual machine with maybe some db hosting.
To me the big benefit of the cloud is using all the little services they provide, like s3, sns, sqs, CloudSearch ECS, cloudwatch and the list goes on and on.
If we were to host all those service ourselves and keep them up to date the operating cost would be huge.
Furthermore I work for a site that is very public and has a lot of for instance ddos threats hanging over head. AWS handles lots of ddos threats all the time and they a much better suited for handling that than our own ops team.
Reninds me a bit of the stirling engine.
It also operates on heat differences.
And it has also not been used as much as one would have thought possible.
The payment provider Nets has confirmed the outage, but says they still don’t know what caused it. According to their statement, there’s no sign of terrorism or foreign interference—just a mysterious, wide-scale failure in the core infrastructure.
Zettle also reported a "major outage" for card processing in Denmark around the same time. Everything was back online within before midnight, but the incident left a lot of people (and businesses) stranded, unable to pay or be paid.
This is one of the most cashless countries in the world, and it really showed how brittle the system can be. No clear cause. No clear prevention. Just… silence and fallback to cash (for those who had any).