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Over 20 million German credit cards disabled by 2010 tech bug

06 January 2010 09:54 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA-Economics. A "year 2010 problem" which surprised software experts has crippled microchips in millions of German payment cards, causing automatic teller machines to swallow what appear to be expired cards, Earthtimes reported.
The DSGV German banking association said Tuesday the problem still affected most credit cards when they were used to withdraw money.
One day earlier, the ZKA national credit-industry committee said it expected direct-debit cards issued by the banks to soon be safe to use again with banks fixing the software problem by late Monday.
Like the "year 2000" problem, in which old software was not designed to recognize any date after 1999, the new glitch was caused by a software error that treats the year 2010 as if it does not exist.
Banks said customers would simply fail to obtain payouts at the "hole-in-the-wall" ATMs where most Germans fetch cash, but one astonished Berlin man said the machine refused to even return his one-month-old card. He was instructed to talk to his bank instead.
Commerzbank, a national bank, said it had "largely" fixed the problem in most of its ATMs.
"Each is receiving new software as fast as we can," a spokeswoman said Tuesday. She said that the ZKA would have to find an answer for Germans abroad who were being refused cash payouts when using direct-debit cards at ATMs in other euro zone nations.
Germany has issued 20 to 25 million new-style debit cards and 3 to 5 million new credit cards which have a microchip instead of a magnetic strip to store information, a banking source said. The ZKA said only one batch of the microchips was causing the problem.
The new anti-fraud technology was developed by EMVCo. That company says more than 730 million payment cards using the new standard were issued last year around the world.