Global IT outage shows cash is vital to society as Microsoft CrowdStrike incident impacts card payments — Retail Technology Innovation Hub

Retailers were among the businesses forced to accept only cash on Friday as a global technology outage crashed payment systems and blocked access to Microsoft services.

The perpetrator was a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. An update to one of their software components, Falcon Sensor, failed and affected computers running Windows.

According to the BRC study, we are seeing a return to many pre-pandemic trends in payments, including smaller but more frequent purchases and a slight return to cash payments.

However, cards now account for the majority of the money spent.

Eamon O’Hearn, GMB National Officer, commented: “The IT outage confirms what GMB has been saying for years: cash is an essential part of how our communities function.”

“Taking cash out of the system means people have nothing to fall back on. This impacts the way they do everyday things – even shopping for groceries. A new discussion needs to start today at the local and national level about how we keep cash in our society.”

Ron Delnevo, chairman of the UK Payment Choice Alliance and a well-known cash advocate, took to social media to highlight a Telegraph article claiming that Waitrose and Waterstones had “gone back to accepting cash” as a result of Friday’s events.

“Both shops already accept cash. They have never stopped doing so, although Waitrose has too many ‘cashless’ self-service checkouts,” he said.

The article also mentions GAIL’s Bakery, which, Delnevo noted, is a different case.

“I wrote to their CEO Tom Molnar last year and asked him to stop the rollout of ‘cashless payments.’ He didn’t listen. Now everyone can see his folly. No doubt the owners of Bain Capital are watching this catastrophic failure in customer service – it’s their money that Tommy is losing.”