A nationwide breakdown of the Nets payment system on Saturday evening was not caused by external malicious activity, according to a press release from the company. The disruption, which affected businesses and individuals in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, as well as some users abroad, led to card payment rejections.

Nets is currently investigating the cause of the breakdown. Initial reports indicated that the problems began around 7 p.m. and were resolved by approximately 10 p.m. on Saturday.

The company has ruled out a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, also known as an overload attack, as the source of the issue. During the outage, many stores activated offline mode on their card terminals to continue processing transactions, which would later be forwarded to Nets.

According to Allan Bonke, country manager at Nets in Denmark, the company has been collaborating with suppliers to identify and resolve the problem. Nets is working to ensure stable operation and will evaluate necessary measures to improve the system’s resilience in similar situations once an analysis is completed.

Søren Winge, Nets’ press officer, confirmed that Iceland was also impacted by the breakdown. Additionally, reports surfaced of Danish citizens experiencing payment difficulties abroad. The disruption extended to traffic on the Great Belt Bridge, causing queues in both directions, according to the Danish Road Directorate. Subsequently, Sund & Bælt reported two incidents of vandalism against booms to the police.