aucisson_masque 2026-02-27 11:19 UTC link

I guess that's the one thing you don't want to be down and yet it's down..

Gravityloss 2026-02-27 11:21 UTC link

Don't banks have their own id:s as well? At least in another nordic country, you have quite many login possibilities to many services. Banks even provide cross-login.

VorpalWay 2026-02-27 11:21 UTC link

The Swedish BankID has the same potential weak point. Any centralised system does.

The way TLS on the Web works is better: as long as the CA is up some time during the period I need to renew it is fine. Digital IDs should really work that way (probably with relatively short life spans just like let's encrypt: the digital ID could need to be renewed once a week for example, and it would opportunisticly renew when less than half the time is left).

bjarteaarmolund 2026-02-27 11:22 UTC link

Supposedly up again now

jdmoreira 2026-02-27 11:24 UTC link

These things should be offline / resilient first right?

Smartcards / YubiKeys.

Never understood the logic for these to be centralised / online.

mollerhoj 2026-02-27 11:25 UTC link

this is not big news in dk, it will be up again soon - i dont know of any mitid services that are life-or-death enough to have people panicing about an hours downtime

dijit 2026-02-27 11:29 UTC link

Terrifying to live in a digital economy when something like this happens.

You're usually about 1 service away from realising that the "money you have" is just an int32, that, if everything works properly, you can modify.

Otherwise you have nothing except a pretty little plastic card.

(I'm aware that payments systems are not affected, but it's a sobering realisation that I've had a couple of times, but it works enough of the time that I forget about it... it's a bit like the meme about backups where a computer takes too long to boot, the person slowly builds panic and starts wishing they had backed up and published all their important work - then when the computer works they say "*phew*, thank god I don't have to do any of that".

azalemeth 2026-02-27 11:34 UTC link

I'm a British expat with a Danish job. I really dislike MitID and the Danish centralised world of (very good) public services that come with it. Each person has a number, CPR, which effectively defines your life solely to the state. Visit a library, doctor, tax man, anything official, and your ID is recorded. Buy alcohol online, go grocery shopping, use your bank card -- and sign in with it. This undoubtedly makes things easier for the state -- and I've seen produce some pretty good epidemiology work where the government can link purchasing habits and health outcomes(!) -- but it's a privacy nightmare.

MitID doesn't work on rooted android phones, or those running a custom rom. Reports from others who have disassembled it indicate that in fact a hard coded list of custom roms is checked against. It's a highly obsfucated binary, and by design is a single point of failure. If you sign in with an unauthorized device it helpfully centrally blacklists your IMEI. It's hard (but not impossible) to get a phone contract on Denmark without indirectly giving over your CPR number, so I imagine trying to get around this is frustrating. I didn't try and have a hardware dongle. One. By design, this whole system is a massive centralised single point of failure. It's absolutely key to Danish life.

That all said, most Danes would vigorously defend privacy, say that the state doesn't abuse its powers, and they're probably right. It's a very vivid vision of the 1960s Nanny State, where Nanny knows best and has your best interests at heart. Most of the time, she does. They're frequently voted as some of the happiest people on earth, so clearly the recipe of pay a ton of tax and get things from it works well. I find the privacy lack rather shocking and I've never got used to it -- in quite some ways it's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that, and tell me to drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest. They point out that the UK has far more CCTV cameras and that we have more prosecutions for bent policemen and politicians. There's truth in all of this.

Either way, I'd be interested in seeing if they issue a post mortem on this. It'll cause a lot of issues for many, many people.

jasonvorhe 2026-02-27 12:02 UTC link

Just one of a dozen reasons to resist digital id.

j45 2026-02-27 12:04 UTC link

At a more basic level, before software issues, digital wallets can run out of batteries. As can infrastructure.

Electricity isn't guaranteed.

balboah 2026-02-27 12:18 UTC link

In Sweden there’s at least one more competitor to BankID called Freja. There’s also some kind of EU-level system.

Would be cool if multiple actors were allowed and shared the same kind of auth signing method so that there aren’t just one point of failure. Or something distributed like a blockchain type of signing method, at least I don’t think Bitcoin or Ethereum have downtime that often, and authorization should probably be read heavy only to check if some identity is still allowed

himata4113 2026-02-27 12:21 UTC link

Makes me appreciate that my government gives me like 17 different ways to authenticate including every bank that exists.

tiku 2026-02-27 12:37 UTC link

Meanwhile the Netherlands is selling the DigiD system to foreign companies and today it came out that we are also are going to outsource of of our key tax systems to an American company.

kevincloudsec 2026-02-27 12:37 UTC link

when your sole digital identity provider goes down, it's not a service disruption. it's a national infrastructure outage. the blast radius of a single authentication system is the entire country.

dude250711 2026-02-27 12:39 UTC link

They went to Linux recently didn't they?

Croftengea 2026-02-27 13:05 UTC link

How ironic to see "MitID remains inaccessible" and "You are in charge of your data" cookie banner on the same page.

Tehnix 2026-02-27 13:06 UTC link

I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a central digital identity service.

As a Dane, having lived in other countries, MitID is an insanely superior to anything I've ever tried. It simplifies so many touchpoints with the government, and is honestly such a good upgrade going from nothing -> physical NemID card with codes -> digital MitID (literally "My ID").

The only real disruption I'd say is if you happen to be buying something online that triggers the 3DS prompt (an additional security layer to prevent cards getting stolen/scam). In Denmark the 3DS prompt for VISA at least uses MitID to verify you are the owner of the card, so that'll obviously not work when MitID is down.

I'll say, it has been surprisingly stable though otherwise, and disruptions usually aren't a big impact (I literally wouldn't have known unless I saw this HackerNews post).

As for a centralized identity system: I personally see this as an acceptable contract for living in a society. Most countries have SSNs anyways, your taxes and many other things are tied to this. Centralizing this identity allows the government to streamline so many things to give a better service to their citizens. For example, all official communication goes to your "DigitalPost" email inbox, your verify identity with "MitID", and every person or company has a registered "NemKonto" tied to them for any salary or government payouts.

I maybe see people get tripped up at the concept that your government should actually care about the service they deliver. That's probably already the point where we diverge when talking about if these things are a good idea or not.

xquce 2026-02-27 14:34 UTC link

Dane by choice (refugee). Would just add as a counterweight to the negative views from people outside the country.

From a technical and user point of view, MitID have had less outages than Cloudflare, AWS and MS Azure in the last year. While I agree with the single point of failure, I also like that I setup my startup with all government and banking online via a login I had the last decade, painless and faster than most places without having to upload a single document in many a unsecured ways I heard from my US and Other European friends (outside the Nordic countries).

Yes we Danes trust our institutions more than others and trust is given by default and then lost, rather then "earned" (I would argue bought) in other places.

dang 2026-02-27 20:36 UTC link

Can anyone tell us the current status? I put "was down" in the title to be conservative, since usually these things get resolved after a few hours.

I converted this to a Tell HN post since there didn't seem to be a good 3rd party article about it in English (yet, at least). The submitted link is in the toptext. (Submitted title was "MitID, Denmarks sole digital ID, has been down for over an hour and counting".)

(p.s. In case anyone is wondering, I think this was a good submission with aspects worth discussing. It set off the flamewar detector, so I turned that off and re-upped the post a bit.)

chr15m 2026-02-28 00:10 UTC link

This type of centralisation presents a classic tail risk. It's wonderful and works perfectly well for everybody and the government does nothing wrong with it. It's all fine and good until the day it isn't. Some authoritarian gets voted in, or the country gets invaded, or a corporation buys off politicians, or an immoral law is passed which you disagree with, and suddenly the digital ID is a point of leverage used to coerce you.

Liberal democracy is a very young experiment and people do not realise how fragile it is. In the 1940s less than 10% of countries were democratic, and we could go back there again easily.

VorpalWay 2026-02-27 11:25 UTC link

As I understand it, BankID in Sweden is still run by one organisation co-owned by the big banks, and banks handle verification for issuance. There is still a single point of failure for the operation of the system.

lxgr 2026-02-27 11:25 UTC link

For anything as high stakes as eID you need real-time revocation checks, which brings you back to at least some level of centralization.

mousepad12 2026-02-27 11:25 UTC link

No. Many/most of them support login through hardware ID on your smartphone (i.e fingerprint/TPM-style pin), but the actual authorization of transfers or any privileged access is entirely MitID

consp 2026-02-27 11:29 UTC link

Revocation.

BSDobelix 2026-02-27 11:31 UTC link

>this is not big news in dk

Yep let's not learn from that incident and wait until is offline for like 2 weeks, and be assured that will happen.

xorcist 2026-02-27 11:34 UTC link

PKI works offline until you realize you need to handle revocations.

For this and related reasons, such as enforcing protocol upgrades, most smartcard systems end up permanently online.

SkiFire13 2026-02-27 11:34 UTC link

Italy's digital ID (SPID) works by having multiple trusted providers that can attest your identity. You can sign up with multiple of them, and if one is not available you could use another one. Not perfect (it's still centralized in the hand of 10-20 providers) but better than nothing. Unfortunately most people only ever signed up with one provider, and the government is now pushing for a more centralized digital ID istead (CieID).

LeonidasXIV 2026-02-27 11:34 UTC link

No. As I understand it the previous system, NemID was actually (co?)designed by the banks so this is what they all use. Likewise MitID is another unholy alliance of Nets (a Danish payment provider) and Danish banks.

Given the Swedish version of it is called BankID I assume the situation is nearly the same in Sweden.

designerarvid 2026-02-27 11:38 UTC link

BankID is not government backed, and most governmental agencies have alternatives to BankID as well.

u1hcw9nx 2026-02-27 11:40 UTC link

Imagine someone "enthusiastically digitized" (as much as possible) in a foreign country alone and then they lose their iPhone Plane tickets, all hotel reservations, they don't remember any phone numbers. They use ApplePay and other mobile payments. Cards may be in the same wallet case.

Without a trusted device or Recovery Key, Apple may impose a security delay (24 hours to several days) before allowing a password reset. Getting new SIM and re-authenticating our life will be pain.

mousepad12 2026-02-27 11:40 UTC link

This is a tech site, not a news site. Threads posted here are rarely if ever "big news" nor is that the point.

The topic is an opener to discuss MitID, electronic ID's in general, the protocols behind them, what happens when they fail, privacy, societies reliance on them or something similar.

repelsteeltje 2026-02-27 11:41 UTC link

Agreed, there should not be a tight (temporal) couple.

But it's a trade off. Long-lived TLS certificates have always had the cert revocation problem. OCSP stapling never took off, so in the end the consensus seems to have been to decrease expiry date. (Mostly fueled by Let's Encrypt / ACME).

Relying on expiration rather than explicit revocation of course also assumes (somewhat) accurately synchronized clocks which is never trivial in distributed systems. In practice it put's pressure on NTP, which itself is susceptible to all kinds of hairy security issue.

I like to think of the temporal aspect as a fail-open / fail-close balance. These centralized solutions favour the former, and that's why we see this resulting outage.

nicoburns 2026-02-27 11:42 UTC link

> the "money you have" is just an int32

If only it was a uint32

mrweasel 2026-02-27 11:48 UTC link

I would recommend getting the hardware dongle. I don't have the app, never did, and I've had none of the issues others have been complaining. The dongle is, generally, a much better experience from what I can tell, except if you need to do any authorizations on the go.

Your other complaints: 100% agree, the whole thing is a privacy nightmare.

I wouldn't count on a post mortem of any value. They still refuse to explain how the system has been abused in the past. Regardless of how hard I try, I fail to understand how it has been abused after QR codes was added to ensure presence at the device you're trying to authenticate at. The system feels secure, but has been abused a number of times and we're almost never told how.

shantara 2026-02-27 11:52 UTC link

I have experienced the same privacy culture shock in Denmark. Generally, I think the people’s trust in their government is the greatest social asset of the danish society, as well as their biggest blind spot.

dijit 2026-02-27 11:53 UTC link

Also British, living across the bridge in Malmö, Sweden.

I really like the centralised system, it makes navigating society surprisingly easy when compared to say, Germany or the UK.

The difference is that I sort of trust the Swedish government, they've never really done anything to breach that trust - up to and including their handling of COVID (while controversial, they took the stance of individual liberty and a "collective responsibility" over mandatory top-down systems).

The UK in contrast has a much more heavy handed relationship with the population, up to and including incarcerating people for saying the phrase "we love bacon" at a construction site or typing the letter "n" on social media. It's a different context entirely.

Also, BankID, the central system is a definite weakness, but you can have a card/pin device that still works, and it does work on grapheneOS, though it will complain a bit if you don't have google services installed... which I find hilariously awful...

macintux 2026-02-27 12:52 UTC link

> …today it came out that we are also are going to outsource of of our key tax systems to an American company.

That’s a remarkable failure to read the room, given the digital sovereignty initiatives across Europe.

kasperni 2026-02-27 12:58 UTC link

> but it's a privacy nightmare.

I've gone the other way from Denmark to UK. And I've often had to mail copies of my passport or other identity documents via email. And my bank requires me to regular scan my face to check that it aligns with the picture in my passport.

dariosalvi78 2026-02-27 13:00 UTC link

Italian living in Sweden, Malmö, and lived in the UK in the past.

I don't get the obsession you Brits have against IDs, in Europe you are pretty much the only ones. But a lot of what you say resonates with my observations:

- single point of failure: absolutely, but so is the "sign in with Google" or equivalent. It's just too convenient. I'd rather have a public service do it than a private company that can cut you out at any time without any explanation.

- Nanny State: 100% also in Sweden, actually worse here. But historically they have been pretty good at protecting freedoms, so far. The UK (or Italy) may be less nanny, but have got some very illiberal things going on these days (left or right government doesn't really matter, it seems).

- Happiest people on earth: I really doubt the surveys measure happiness. They tend to measure trust in institutions, which is very high in Scandinavia.

- It's an incredibly authoritarian society although no Dane would ever say that: exactly the same in Sweden! They would NEVER admit any failure in their society, no matter the hard evidence in front of their eyes. I guess that it's the other side of the same trust of the previous point.

- Drink more øl and get off the internet and go for a walk in a forest: At least you've got øl, in Sweden alcohol is taboo. Forests are nice, but become boring quite quickly :)

Muromec 2026-02-27 13:03 UTC link

Isn't it the hosting provide and not digid itself?

winstonwinston 2026-02-27 15:59 UTC link

> I see a few people here complaining about the idea of a central digital identity service.

Digital identity service is fine for gov services. It’s not OK as a hard requirement for anything else such as banking.

Digital ID in my country is down for about 7 days and counting. iOS app no longer opens after the recent update. I cannot pay tax without digital id app working but i can do banking and everything else.

Doerge 2026-02-27 20:59 UTC link

The linked page has 3 down updates, then says it's back up again after the 3rd one. So presumably resolved.

kakoni 2026-02-27 21:32 UTC link

Finland did that + lot more. Tax system from Gentax, EHR from Epic and social benefits from Salesforce.

ge96 2026-02-27 22:46 UTC link

Was at a checkout the other day, forgot my wallet in my bag, thoughts went through my mind: tap to pay? (not setup), crypto? (need USD, tap to pay). Had bad internet in that one spot, faster to run outside to my car and get my wallet.

mousepad12 2026-02-27 22:58 UTC link

Hi dang, Thanks for the edit.

It is indeed up again, and I appreciate you recognizing that the thread had/have some great discussion aspects about e-ID in general.

It was completely down from 10:40 to 12:17 GMT+1

tyilo 2026-02-27 23:04 UTC link

> The only real disruption I'd say is if you happen to be buying something online that triggers the 3DS prompt (an additional security layer to prevent cards getting stolen/scam). In Denmark the 3DS prompt for VISA at least uses MitID to verify you are the owner of the card, so that'll obviously not work when MitID is down.

If you use Lunar, the 3DS prompt uses the Lunar app and not MitID.

neya 2026-02-27 23:43 UTC link

> "money you have" is just an int32

Damn, that's terrifyingly eye opening. That's a really, really strong argument for physical cash (or gold maybe?)

throwmitid1234 2026-02-28 00:34 UTC link

This is mostly a case of them not really reporting it, MitID is down quite frequently (now once a month ish, but in the first few years every week or so), or at least partially down . They now finally have their own status page, previously you had to get your status from a provider when they noticed that logins began to fail ;)

They're very light on reporting issues, in this case Signaturgruppen a subsidiary of NETS, didn't even mark this as a full outage.

throwmitid1234 2026-02-28 00:36 UTC link

Payments were affected somewhat. In Denmark it is often required to sign in to MitID when doing online transactions using credit/debit cards, it is called 3D Secure. You usually have other options. MobilePay, PayPal, the likes.

throwmitid1234 2026-02-28 00:52 UTC link

MitID and NemID before it was pretty much bought by the Banks and the government together.

It is to avoid the banks needing their own id for customers, as people would need to go into the banks using their passports etc to register.

Some banks do have their own logins and IDs for various purposes, but you often need MitID somewhere in there simply to verify the actual identity of the person with the account. All the other logins simply give you access to the ID it doesn't actually verify it. MitID does that.

For example Lunar doesn't need MitID during 3D Secure (online payments), but that is only because you used MitID at some point to store your proof on your phone, that you can unlock with a secure enough method, and then do the payment. This is considered enough, as you still use an identity that has been verified by MitID at some point.

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