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!
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.
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.
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.
"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!