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What happens to the card terminal if the internet goes down in your restaurant?

By Pablo Bouzon · 8 October 2026 ·5 min read
What happens to the card terminal if the internet goes down in your restaurant?

It’s 10:30 pm on a Saturday, the dining room is full and the internet goes down. Every restaurant owner asks the same thing: what happens to the card terminal if the internet goes down? The short answer is that there are two different devices and each one fails for its own reason. Mixing them up is what turns an outage into a queue of people waiting to pay.

The card terminal and the POS are not the same thing

The card terminal (your bank’s device) authorises the card payment. To do that it has to talk to your bank, and how it does depends on its model and your contract: some carry their own SIM with mobile data, others hang off the venue’s WiFi or cable. If yours is on the network that just went down, it won’t authorise the payment, and no POS can fix that: it’s down to the terminal and your bank. If you don’t know how yours is connected, ask your bank before high season, not during it.

The POS is the software where you open the table, send the order to the kitchen, record what was paid and close the till. A cloud POS that demands internet for everything stops just like the terminal. One designed for outages keeps working.

What keeps working in our POS without internet

Everything below is implemented and published, action by action, on our offline mode page. In short:

  • Keep taking orders: open tables, add and edit items, move an order to another table and apply discounts.
  • Send the order to the kitchen: the device builds the ticket and prints directly over the local network or Bluetooth, without going through the internet. More in kitchen Bluetooth printers.
  • Record the payment: cash, card on your external terminal, Bizum, bank transfer and vouchers. If your terminal has its own connection, you charge with it as usual and the POS records it as a card payment on the order and in the till close.
  • Close the order and the till: the offline close is flagged on screen as an estimate and the server recalculates the final figures on sync.

The POS detects the outage by itself (a ping to the server every 20 seconds; two failures in a row and it goes offline), shows a banner and stores each action in a queue. When the connection returns, the queue is sent in order. Each action carries a unique ID, so resending it doesn’t duplicate sales.

What it can’t do without internet (worth knowing)

We’d rather you hear it from us than find out with a full dining room:

  • The fiscal ticket with the Verifactu QR is born when the ticket syncs. Offline, a provisional bill is printed, marked “no fiscal validity”; the fiscal record is numbered and chained in order on reconnection, and the fiscal copy is reprinted then.
  • Customer QR payment from their own phone (Stripe) needs a connection to authorise. During the outage, guests pay in cash or on your terminal.
  • The Z report and historical closes are aggregates only the server holds: offline you get a provisional close; the Z is printed once back online.
  • Customer QR self-ordering doesn’t work without the server either.

And offline mode is not a way to run without a connection indefinitely: the device holds a licence with a 72-hour grace period that renews on every connection.

A three-step plan for the night it happens

  1. Find out how your card terminal connects (own SIM, WiFi or cable) and, if it depends on the venue network, ask your bank about a mobile-data alternative.
  2. Have a plan B for payment: cash and Bizum are recorded in the POS the same with or without a connection.
  3. Check that your kitchen printer prints without internet. Try it by switching off the router on a Tuesday afternoon, not on a Saturday at 10:30 pm.

If you want to see how the POS behaves with network drops in your restaurant, get in touch, see the plans or the POS for restaurants in Málaga.

Frequently asked questions

Can I take card payments if the internet goes down? It depends on the terminal, not the POS. If your terminal has its own mobile data it keeps authorising when the venue WiFi drops; if it hangs off that same network, it won’t. The POS records the card payment either way, but it can’t force your bank to authorise it.

Are sales made offline lost? No. Each action is stored on the device and sent in order when the network returns, with a unique ID that prevents duplicates.

What about Verifactu if I close tickets offline? The ticket closes with its fiscal record deferred: on reconnection it is numbered and chained in order. What can’t be produced offline is the fiscal paper with the QR; a provisional bill is printed and the fiscal copy later.

Does customer QR payment work without internet? No. Authorising the payment with Stripe needs a connection. During the outage, guests pay in cash or on the terminal.

Do I need a 4G router to use the POS offline? No. Offline mode runs on the device you already use and kitchen printing goes over the local network or Bluetooth. A 4G router might help your card terminal if it relies on the venue WiFi, but that’s something to settle with your bank.