The cards were knocked out simultaneously in several countries: Death threat

Payment disruption in several European countries – death threat at bridge

Emil Forsberg, 

Hans Österman, 

Josefine Karlsson

Updated 01.10 | Published 2025-07-19 21.13

 

The payment provider Nets was down for several hours.

The cards stopped working in Sweden and several other countries.

In Denmark, the chaos led to police calls after death threats at a bridge.

Nets, based in Denmark, is a leading player in card payments in the Nordics. On Saturday evening, the company's terminals stopped working in several countries. According to Jyllandsposten, at least Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland were affected.

Nets' press manager Søren Winge tells the newspaper that the outage began at 7:30 p.m. and lasted almost three hours. Shortly after 10 p.m., he stated that payments appeared to be going through again.

The cause of the outage is unclear, but according to Winge there are no signs of an attack.

– We will of course keep an eye on the situation in the coming hours and try to understand what happened and what may have caused it, he says.

Many readers contacted Aftonbladet saying they were unable to pay. On the Downdetector site, users reported problems with Visa, Skandiabanken, Nordea, Mastercard and Handelsbanken.

 

Gabriel Klitkou before he ran out of food. Photo: Private

Cakes and salty sticks

Swedish Gabriel Klitkou is in Denmark with his family. They tried to buy food at Coop but were turned away because they had no cash.

– We had to turn around at the checkout. We went to an ATM and then another, but there was a technical fault with both. They said it applies to all of Denmark, he said.

They waited a long time to get food.

– We have a package of cookies and a bag of salty sticks left.

“A hell of a thing”

A restaurant owner told Aftonbladet that no restaurants could take payment.

– We have guests that we have had to let go because they were in a hurry and couldn’t pay. It feels so fucking awful.

– I got a text message from my son who works at a restaurant in Norway. It’s the same there. It’s a hell of a thing.

The ferry between Helsingör and Helsingborg was also affected.

– It’s chaos. They’re letting all passengers on and everyone gets to travel for free. We tried to go to a restaurant in Helsingör but we couldn’t pay. The whole system is down, said one reader.

Death threat at the bridge

Aftonbladet also received messages from Swedes in, among others, France, Poland and Germany. All of them stated that their cards didn’t work.

Danish TV2 received similar information from travelers in Turkey and Italy.

The card mess also led to chaos at the Great Belt Bridge in Denmark. When motorists were unable to pay for the passage, frustration grew in the queue and the police had to be called in. The staff received death threats and the barriers were vandalized, the police write X.