More than 30 million people are unable to use their German debit / credit cards since the start of the year 2010 due to payment systems failing to recognize the year 2010. This issue is being attributed to a delayed Y2K (Year 2000) bug on their systems.
20 million electronic cash cards (also known as girocards) and 3.5 million classic credit cards were affected according to DSGV (one of the biggest association representing banks within Germany), DSGV has announced they would be resolving the issue within a week.
Gemalto (one of the worlds biggest chip card maker) has been identified as the culprit of this bug problem (reported by two german newspapers – Handelsblatt and Koelner Stadt-Anzeiger), Gemalto says they are aware of the issue and many of their cards have also been facing the same problem.
All most all banks of Germany are either fully or partially affected as of now. Maybe the time has come to dump the old payment methods and move on to something more useful as USB credit cards.
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