There is no official word yet why several major retail brands in the UK couldn’t accept contactless payments for several days in March. The incident exemplifies how strict reliance on digital payments can make societies less resilient.

The outage hit McDonald’s, supermarkets Tesco and Sainsbury, and others, forcing several business locations to close entirely. The incident “highlights retailers’ increasing reliance on third-party payment systems and the technical issues hampering a global shift from cash to digital payments,” according to a CIO magazine report. (“Payment-processing outages at UK retailers raise reliability issues for cashless transactions,” 20 March, 2024.)

Narayana Pappu, CEO at Zendata, a provider of data security and privacy compliance solutions, is among several analysts warning about the complexity of the digital payment environment, noting that to fulfill card and other types of cashless payments, retailers must rely on third parties, and often a lot of them. “Typically, there are 10 intermediaries between a consumer swiping their credit card and a merchant getting paid,” Pappu told CIO.

The UK’s Payments Service Regulator said it would investigate the string of IT failures but has not released its official findings.