[nmcveity]

This gem from the ABC news coverage has my mind 100% boggled:

"711 has been affected by the outage … went in to buy a sandwich and a coffee and they couldn’t even open the till. People who had filled up their cars were getting stuck in the shop because they couldn’t pay."

Can't even take CASH payment without the computer, what a world!

[Scoundreller]

Technically a payment terminal can go into island mode and take offline credit card transactions and post them later. PIN can be verified against the card.

Depends if the retailer wants to take the chance of all that.

[nielsole]

That is if the terminal is not dead itself

[sgammon]

The terminal is probably not running Crowdstrike...

[kristjansson]

Terminal running Windows? Someone is going to make it run Crowdstrike too.

[j-bos]

You might be surprised..

[sgammon]

Crowdstrike != Windows ;)

[sgammon]

"Probably" is a load bearing word

[jeffhuys]

Dude. SO MUCH STUFF runs on Windows.

[Ekaros]

Terminal is probably fine, the machine that tells it number to charge is dead... And it is probably not even setup to accept manual payment inputs.

[Scoundreller]

Yeah, all depends on how much config you want to allow employees to do, but I’m sure the functionality is there if you wish to enable it.

[robotnikman]

Having worked with some of these retail systems, yes, it depends on how they are configured.

There are stores in many places in the country with sporadic internet or where outages are not uncommon, and where you would want to configure the terminals to still work while offline. In these cases, the payment terminals can be configured to take offline transactions, and they are stored locally on the lane or a server located in the store until a connection to the internet is re-established.

[thyrsus]

Not this time. Use paper, pen, and a non-electronic cash box.

[jimmydorry]

Good luck putting a payment terminal into island mode when it's in a bluescreen loop.

[skerit]

I'm seeing several reports of things like being unable to buy tickets for the train on-line in Belgium.

They use Windows as a part of their server infrastructure?

[timthorn]

At least they'd take cash if the computer wasn't broken. That's getting quite rare in the UK.

[physicsguy]

Not really? I've only really seen people not taking cash at trendy street food stalls and bougie coffee shops, pretty much everywhere else does.

[timthorn]

Not just indie coffee shops - chains too. Pubs, clothes shops... Even the Raspberry Pi store

[jeffhuys]

Netherlands is the worst at this. More and more “PIN ONLY”. Also more and more tight rules about how much you're allowed to have.

Luckily I can just give someone a paper wallet containing crypto. No transactions, no traceability, no rules.

[orf]

In London it’s really common

[physicsguy]

At where though? The example given was in 711 which is a nationwide chain a bit like a Tesco Express or Sainsbury's Local, both of which still accept cash nationwide in the UK too.

[xdennis]

Aldi, apparently. That's where Piers Corbyn couldn't buy strawberries with cash. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/piers-corbyn-splits-op...