It highlights the risk of a fragile infrastructure.
ADDED: And yes. Sometimes places are simply not setup to be able to take cash.
Reports about failing Apple/Google Pay actually pertained to the POS terminals the payment terminals are connected to, and not the payment infrastructure itself.
Another interesting takeaway is that we used to have an extra layer of redundancy available at the last mile of the payment processing: slip machines. They were a workaround and a fallback for exactly this kind of problem where the payment could not be processed electronically, a card payment slip would be taken, and the payment would be later processed manually.
However, with the uptake and the scale of electronic payments, card payment slips are no longer a thing mostly due to fraud related issues, plus the inconvenience of having to keep such a large contraption under the till. Even where still available, it may no longer be possible to use it as more and more debit (in particular) and even credit cards do not emboss the card details on the plastic/metal anymore.
But it’s in the shelf surely? Probably on an e-ink display.
Putting up a sign that says no cash ain’t gonna cut it.
Plus here the opposite is often true: not being able to pay with card because the reader is “broken” so that you’re forced to use cash, they don’t have to pay the transaction fee and more often than not they can also don’t make you a receipt.
A few bars in Portland are still cash only!
Funnily enough, I was on a Whale Watch the other day in MA which was cash only. Didn't buy anything but it was presumably because they were out of cell coverage.
I’ve seen “for employee safety, no cash payment” signs in larger cities, so I always assumed that was the main reason.
Bridges collapse; police go corrupt; electricity has outages; gasoline suffers price shocks; governments have a 100% failure rate; an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times.
All we can do is:
A. Diversify, under the belief nothing is infallible; and even perfect engineering can experience catastrophic failure
B. Enjoy what we have today, knowing it is a gift, not a right
Also, while we blame CrowdStrike, let’s not forget that SSH was within weeks of being backdoored on a global scale. The power that would have unleashed (and proxy power, I.e. breaking into CloudStrike and then Windows by extension) very well could have ended the internet.
No, and it doesn't need to be. We can build redundancy on every level. We can plan for failure and prepare for contingencies. We alwas need a plan B (and C and D for critical services). Will it be efficient or cheap? Of course not - we'd be building two for the price of two, but being sure that, when one fails, we have a redundant one to catch the fall of civilization.
We can't just optimize away every gram of safety and hope everything goes to plan (as they did in this case). Hope is not a strategy.
"an 1870s-style solar flare would send us back to medieval times"
This is not true and it would have no effect on microelectronics.
Hence keeping cash alive has it’s advantages
2020s UK electricity infrastructure is more reliable than 1980s UK electricity infrastructure, for example.
...basically, label your axes.