Complaint – Stone Age payment systems and wasted time in the year 2026

I am writing to you today to express my utter disbelief at the state of your customer service and technical infrastructure.

On May 29th, I woke up to the nightmare that my Samsung S20FE was completely dead. Without a working phone, I was entirely cut off from essential services, including my bank accounts. Since quick action was required, I travelled from Esslingen to Tübingen around 9:00 AM, arriving at your local shop shortly after 10:00 AM. As other customers were being dealt with, I waited patiently for a little over an hour.

I had decided to add a new smartphone to my existing contract. The shop manager/owner there could not have been more helpful – I explicitly do not blame him. However, after I decided on a new Samsung S26, the entire transaction collapsed due to a bureaucratic farce: I was unable to use my card to pay the required down payment of a whopping €1.00 because it was not a traditional German Girocard.

Here are a few facts for your quality management team: I am a partner in a fully registered GmbH. We use the digital banks Finom and N26. Your company has always successfully deducted my monthly contract payments via direct debit from this exact N26 account. The logic completely escapes me how an international telecommunications giant like O2, in the year 2026, is incapable of processing a €1.00 card payment using a standard Visa/Mastercard debit card from a European digital bank. But hey, this is Germany, so this prime example of distrust, short-sighted thinking, and an absolute lack of customer focus from a German branch of an international provider shouldn't really surprise me anymore.

The manager was massively apologetic, and I feel bad for him: he lost a guaranteed sale solely because of your backward corporate policy.

So, after wasting most of my morning travelling from Esslingen to Tübingen, waiting in the shop, and being ultimately disappointed, I walked straight to MediaMarkt. There, I was able to purchase the Samsung S26 outright without any issues – an immediate expense I did not want to bear, but was compelled to do so thanks to your inflexibility and my lack of a working phone.

My contract (which includes my wife and business partner's phone) is due for renewal in September. We fully intended to upgrade this to an O2 business account via our GmbH. In light of this experience, we are now thoroughly reconsidering this and have already actively started looking elsewhere for a deal.

As an entrepreneur, my time is money. If I am waiting around for a poor outcome, that represents lost revenue and missed opportunities, which I can ill afford during a business launch. I am absolutely not interested in excuses as to why O2 cannot accept modern bank cards in the 21st century.

I want to know what you as a company intend to do to ensure that other customers do not have to experience this absolute service desert again?

I look forward to your response with bated breath.

Regards,

Marco Solas

Edit: Thread moved to our english community, o2 Michi, 02.06.2026