On 23 June 2026, in the middle of England’s World Cup match against Ghana, card and contactless payments failed at supermarkets, pubs and transport hubs. A power disruption hit the transaction authorisations of Worldpay, one of the UK’s largest card paymentA transfer of funds which discharges an obligation on the part of a payer vis-à-vis a payee. More processors. Venues switched to cash-only overnight and queues formed at ATMs as card-only checkouts went empty.
Three weeks later, in Japan, payment terminals at convenience stores, station ticket machines and transit top-ups went down across the country for roughly four hours. The culprit was a routine “programme change” at Visa’s CyberSource merchant-connecting service — not an attack. Only the merchants that still took cashMoney in physical form such as banknotes and coins. More kept trading.
Since late August 2026, El Niño flooding has kept Ecuador under a red alert: 648 adverse events, at least 11 people killed, close to 49,000 affected and some 12,000 homes damaged. Guayaquil, the country’s largest city, flooded twice in a single week, and power was cut in the worst-hit sectors. When the grid fails in a flooded city, POSAbbreviation for “point of sale”. See Point-of-Sale terminal. More terminals and ATMs fail with it.
The fallback value of cash is now quantifiable. A Swiss National Bank paper published in October 2026 examined a card system failure at one of Switzerland’s largest retailers that lasted nearly a full business day across some 2,400 stores. For every CHF 100 of card payments lost, ATM withdrawals rose by roughly CHF 68. Consumers did not switch to other digital payments. They switched to cash.
The uncomfortable truth is that cash payments work without electricity or connectivity, but cash relies on its own infrastructure — ATMs, cash centres, bank branches, cash-in-transit — and that infrastructure is deteriorating.
Take ATMs. As CashEssentials documented in Solving the ATM Paradox the number of ATMs is declining in a growing number of countries: Belgium’s ATM network is shrinking at 12.2% a year and now stands at just 31% of its peak; Ireland’s machines are disappearing at 9.5% a year, leaving the network at 37% of its peak; and Brazil lost 21% of its machines in five years. Fewer machines mean longer journeys and queues — a real price paid by the public. Bank branches are disappearing even faster, down 43% across the EU between 2008 and 2023. Central banks and many other institutions across the globe now publicly urge every household to keep cash on hand in case of an emergency — sound advice, but a real challenge when the cost of living bites.
Acceptance is also eroding. In the UK, LINK’s research finds that only 77% of small retailers accept cash — which means nearly one in four does not. A shop that has gone card-only cannot simply revert to cash when the card system fails; the till that could have saved the day no longer exists. The Netherlands drew the obvious conclusion, legislating mandatory cash acceptance for essential goods.
Access and acceptance are the obvious pillars of the resilience of cash — but they are not enough. If cash is the fallback, then the cash cycleRepresents the various stages of the lifecycle of cash, from issuance by the central bank, circulation in the economy, to destruction by the central bank. More must be deliberately engineered to survive the shocks that digital systems cannot. Several areas need to be looked at as well:
The National Bank of Poland’s recent conference Shaping a New Reality of Cash put it plainly: resilience must be built in normal times. A fallback that has never been designed, funded, rehearsed or tested is not a fallback. It is an assumption. The outages of 2026 were a real-world test, and cash passed it — wherever the infrastructure still existed to take the exam. Whether it exists for the next one is a choice being made now, mostly by default.