Swiss Outrage at TWINT Outage

The importance of having a resilient, offline payment option was highlighted last week in Switzerland as a popular cashless payment app went down and social media filled up with praise for cash.

20 Minuten—a widely-read newspaper distributed free to Swiss commuters—reports the TWINT payment network was disrupted on Friday 19 January, leaving people unable to make payments. Many users also experienced problems with card transactions, with comments on the 20 Minuten article emphasising the importance of cash not just for personal choice, but to enable payments during provider outages or power cuts.

User Betupfter summed up the sentiments with the succinct German phrase ‘Nur Bares ist Wahres!’ meaning ‘only cash is true.’ AndreaHofer added ‘That’s why you should always have enough cash with you’ while swisssneaks said: ‘Cash is king. I also have a credit card and debit card for emergencies, but cash rarely fails. Plastic money, much more often.’

While brief network outages are typically only a minor inconvenience, they can be extensive and lengthy enough to cause more serious disruption. Last year, problems at payment processing company Moneris, knocked out card transactions across large swathes of Canada, with similar problems followinf in Uruguay, Australia, Japan and Singapore. In a more severe example, catastrophic flooding across central China in 2021 caused a ‘digital dark age’ that led to cash being included on a list of survival necessities.

Whether big or small, network outages serve as a reminder of one vital role cash plays in economies: offering a resilient payment option that will continue to function when others fail.