A Nets fault double-charges thousands of Nordic cardholders, four days after intermittent authorisation failures

A technical fault at Nets charged some card customers twice for the same purchase in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, reported by Danish public broadcaster DR on 16 October 2026. Nets press chief Peter Glüsing Pedersen said the company did not know the exact number affected and estimated a couple of thousand in Denmark, a very small share of the roughly handful of million transactions Nets handles daily.

He said the error had been discovered the previous day and that the duplicate transactions would be deleted once the fix was in place later that Friday. Four days earlier, on 12 October, Nexi's own status page recorded intermittent payment authorisation and cancellation failures on Nets Acquiring affecting terminals in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland from about 06:08 UTC, arriving in bursts of two to four minutes, with the service stable again from about 08:51 UTC and failed payments not charged.

Nets is the acquiring and processing layer under a large share of Nordic card acceptance, and two separate faults inside one week, one that refused payments and one that took them twice, land on the operational reliability question the region has been asking since the much larger Nets disruption in May 2026. For merchants the two failures are not equivalent: a declined authorisation is a lost sale, while a duplicate charge is a reconciliation and customer-service problem that arrives at the till rather than at the processor.

The timing also matters for the offline-payment mandate Mastercard set for Europe the week before, which exists precisely because digital acceptance fails as a single point of failure; the Nordics already run offline arrangements, and these incidents show what the residual exposure looks like when the fault is inside the processor rather than in the network.

Whether Nets publishes a root cause for either fault, whether the 12 October authorisation incident is formally closed, how much of the duplicate charging was reversed without customers having to contact their banks, and whether Nordic regulators or Danmarks Nationalbank treat the pattern as an operational resilience matter under DORA.

• dr.dk