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Comment by markus92 | Hacker News Reader

All major US airlines have put in a total ground stop. No flights can take off anymore.

It's morning here in Europe, departure peak time. We're still flying, but...

The problems mean the takeoff and weight & balance data is missing. It needs to be done manual by each crew. Baggage handling is also manual, so that means counting bags and the cabin crew counting people. Then manually calculating performance data before you can take off.

Big delays everywhere.

> It's morning here in Europe, departure peak time. We're still flying, but...

Looks like some airlines aren't flying, KLM being one of them.

Is it KLM, or just the KLM flights operated by Delta (of which there are a decent chunk)?

Sounds like it's a majority of KLM flights, so seemingly it's themselves.

KLM was flying, but all flights pass through Schiphol Airport (it's their hub) and Schiphol couldn't board fights for a while. Because of that they ran out of gates for arriving flights, so everyone had to cancel flights to avoid compounding delays. As the biggest user of Schiphol that means KLM had to cancel a lot of flights.

It's not all of Europe. The airports in Norway are operating as normal. One of the airlines reported booking issues on their website, but I haven't read about any other issues.

Some international flights have been delayed or canceled of course, depending on the route.

> It needs to be done manual by each crew.

I can't imagine believing that this computation, ordinarily automated by these out of service systems, can be performed correctly by crews that probably haven't had to do this in ... years?

At most places there is an iPad app that does the calculation locally. So it's mostly entering a lot of numbers and checking that the results make sense. Usually both crew members do it individually, and then cross check the results.

All airlines in Russia are operating as usual. Sanctions work in unpredictable ways

Electronic payment at grocery stores in the US is affected.

POS down? Payment processor down?

Lotta different grocery stores and processors in USA. WHO?

I’m Amazed at that. I had no idea the US had caught up and had electronic payments.

All five payment terminals in Germany are down. "Unfortunately, all online governmental services are affected. All two of them" says the chancellor.

I’m guessing for chip reading? It’s one-time transaction key so I don’t think it works async.

What are you talking about? Credit cards have been around since the 1950's

For much of their history they were written down or copied on carbon paper and manually processed by phone later. Electronic processing came in the 70s and wasn't universally used until much later. I saw plenty of credit card imprinters in use well into the 90s when I was growing up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter

Card issuers only stopped embossing them recently.

Not all. Only some. And many are already lifted.

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