UPDATE: NemID fully functional again

Many Danes remain unable to log in to essential accounts

The crash affecting log-in solution NemID and its connected services has finally been solved.

All users can now log on again to their online accounts for banking, taxes, government documents, email and medical records.  

Original story:

A crash affecting log-in solution NemID and its connected services is yet to be resolved after two days. Since early June 22, about one-third of all users have faced issues accessing online accounts for banking, taxes, government documents, email and medical records.  

Nets, the company responsible for NemID, reports that the crash is a result of a server change. An outage of this length is unprecedented.

“It’s extremely serious,” Roskilde University professor Jan Pries Heje told DR. “On a scale from one to 10, we are probably up to an eight or nine – especially if they do not solve the problem soon,”

A flawed system?
The vast majority of Danes over the age of 15 use NemID, making it highly integral to everyday life in Denmark. MitID, which is set to replace NemID, further serves over three-quarters of Danish people, according to Nets, and has also been presenting problems for users.

Digitaliseringsstyrelsen, the digitisation agency, asserts that having a common point of access for public and private accounts is ultimately beneficial for Denmark, as it streamlines the logging-in process. However, others have compared it to having all of one’s eggs in one basket.

“NemID has become part of our public infrastructure, so it is just as important as getting electricity out of the socket and water out of the tap,” said Jan Pries Heje.

What to expect next
For urgent digital tasks, such as reporting death certificates, paper-based solutions are in some cases available. It is unclear when NemID will be up and running again.

“The answer is unfortunately that you have to arm yourself with patience until we get the service up and running at full speed,” Peter Güsling, head of Nets’ media relations in the Nordic countries, told DR.

“Hopefully it will happen as soon as possible.”