Cash Helps Canadians Cope with Cashless Crash

Payments across Canada switched to cash on a late September Saturday as a network outage at cashless payment processing company Moneris knocked out card transactions across large swathes of the country, including Ontario, British Columbia, Mississauga and Winnipeg.

CBC reports Moneris—which provides cashless payment services to around 325,000 merchant locations throughout Canada—experienced an outage lasting approximately 90 minutes in the afternoon, though it declined to say how widespread the problem was or what had caused it.

Social media lit up with businesses advising customers they were unable to process card payments and were ‘working on an interim solution’, with an Ottowan user of news and discussion site Reddit advising people businesses in their area had gone cash-only and lines at ATMs were getting long.

The disruption caused to businesses and customers by this relatively short outage is a timely reminder that cash does not crash, and having stash of it to hand is valuable for occasions when cashless options are experiencing downtime, which can stretch into days or even weeks in cases where electrical or internet infrastructure is damaged.