Shopping Shutdown

On the Friday before Christmas, one of the busiest shopping days of the year, EFTPOS terminals across New Zealand shut down. Paymark EFTPOS, which accounts for 80% of all electronic transactions, said that the outage was caused by a hardware failure at around 12:50 pm. This failure caused performance to degrade to the point where the system had to be rebooted. The system was not restarted until about 3 pm.

The outage frustrated Christmas shoppers. Lengthening queues of last-minute shoppers faced manual "zip-zap" card machines and long lines at cash machines. Many had to leave their purchases behind.

The Retailers' Association Spokesperson, Barry Hellberg said that EFTPOS network failures are uncommon, so it is just bad luck it happened so close to Christmas.

I do not believe in luck. Nothing in God's universe happens by chance. Everything has meaning, so what was the meaning of this system crash, which no one forsaw, which no one could prevent and which disrupted out Christmas spend..

Maybe this was a warning event for New Zealand.

Or maybe God was trying to save us from ourselves. Maybe he was saying, Threshing the plastic will not add an ounce to the joy of Christmas. If you understood that Jesus was God come to earth, you would have abundant joy. This gift is freely available, even when EFTPOS is down.