So there they stand like analog memorials: In the entrances of numerous shops there are now signs that draw the attention of customers to the fact that only cash payment is possible or no card payment.

It's been like this for almost a week now.

Last Wednesday, terminals from the American manufacturer Verifone failed over a large area.

But how could this have happened at all?

Franz Nestler

Editor in Business.

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The H5000, as the terminal is called, was a good product to come out in 2012, payment experts say.

The easier-to-read color display and the option of making contactless payments were obvious to many customers.

Teething problems like slow processing of payments were quickly overcome by many merchants.

According to Verifone's own advertising, it is the best-selling terminal in Germany, but it is hardly used elsewhere.

Exactly how many of these were sold is hard to say, but in 2018 they self-promoted 350,000 active H5000 terminals.

At that time almost 840,000 terminals were in use, so this model type alone had a market penetration of 40 percent.

The best-known customers today still include the drugstore chains Rossmann and dm, as well as Aldi Nord.

The Kamps and Ditsch bakery chains are also among the customers.

Also some Edeka regions, some net markets and travel centers of the train as well as the so-called service stores.

The terminals were sold primarily by Concardis and Payone, the two major German payment service providers.

But the H5000 was also sold by smaller providers and even banks.

The product is obsolete

But the product is now ten years old.

The device has not been sold by Verifone for three to four years, and support will even be completely discontinued in 2023.

Such devices therefore also have to be replaced regularly.

Irrespective of this, such devices are constantly updated in the form of certificates so that they can identify themselves to banks and payment processors in order to confirm their authenticity - otherwise the floodgates would be wide open to scammers and hackers.

The non-functional devices cannot simply be repaired.

If you switch off the terminal, nothing works.

The reason is that the device now reports that it is missing a certificate.

And without a certificate, there is no access to this payment infrastructure or the terminal.

This is done for security reasons, but there is no information as to why the certificate is missing, also because Verifone does not communicate about it.

The certificate may have expired, been deleted, or be unreadable.

Verifone at least denies that the certificate could have expired, the company itself speaks of a "software malfunction" in a statement and otherwise does not respond to press inquiries.

Two independent sources disagree with this newspaper.

A certificate is said to have expired last Tuesday and should have been replaced by a new one - and on Wednesday the payment problems began.

This certificate was supposed to be installed with a software update on December 25th, but this obviously didn't happen.