When I was traveling in London in 2018 I was barely able to pay for the groceries I needed in order to eat that night because I was checking out just as the global VISA outage started happening.
The machine took a long time to process my payment, but after a couple of attempts it managed to go through. As I left the store I noticed a long line forming for the self-checkout registers, and nobody else was able to get their payments to go through. There was apparently no option to fall back to cash at that store.
Whenever I travel now one of the bits of research I do now is to make sure I have a plan for getting basic necessities like food and shelter should an electronic payment system outage like that happen again.
When I was traveling in London in 2018 I was barely able to pay for the groceries I needed in order to eat that night because I was checking out just as the global VISA outage started happening.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2018/jun/01/visa-outa...
The machine took a long time to process my payment, but after a couple of attempts it managed to go through. As I left the store I noticed a long line forming for the self-checkout registers, and nobody else was able to get their payments to go through. There was apparently no option to fall back to cash at that store.
Whenever I travel now one of the bits of research I do now is to make sure I have a plan for getting basic necessities like food and shelter should an electronic payment system outage like that happen again.