When an update to CrowdStrike crashed millions of Microsoft systems around the world on Friday, many businesses were faced with a choice: accept cash only or close until their systems were back online.
This quickly caused chaos in Australia, where the government has explicitly encouraged businesses to go cashless. Photos posted on social media showed card-only self-checkouts at supermarket chain Coles with blue screens of death. Queues at human-operated checkouts at Australian supermarkets stretched all the way to the back of the store, according to local media. Some Australian supermarkets simply locked their doors.
Meanwhile, as social media has shown, some Indian airlines have had to issue handwritten boarding passes to people with flights scheduled for Friday. In the US, a number of businesses, including the Norfolk Tides minor league baseball team, public swimming pools in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and the Film Forum cinema in New York, announced that they would only accept cash until further notice.
Starbucks, whose then-CEO said in 2020 that the company was transitioning to “more cashless experiences,” appeared to be particularly hard hit. A Starbucks employee in Kansas posted a TikTok showing that the mobile ordering system was “completely down.” The machine the store uses to print labels for cups also wasn’t working. “It comes out blank every time,” she said, pointing to the label printer. She told WIRED that some customers were “angry and very rude” when she tried to explain it. Another Starbucks employee said on TikTok that she had to write down every order on sticky notes.
To add to the chaos, Starbucks had a $3 drink deal for its rewards program members on Friday (at least in the U.S.). One Starbucks employee in Florida told WIRED that the situation made Friday, an “extremely busy” weekday under normal circumstances, even more stressful. While most people were understanding, she said, there were “a few frustrated people outside” when the store had to close its indoor dining area and focus on the drive-through.
Richard Forno, a professor of cybersecurity at the University of Maryland, tells WIRED that Friday's outage highlights the vulnerability of our current cloud and internet infrastructure. “Software supply chains have long been a serious cybersecurity problem and a potential single point of failure,” Forno says. “With any luck, given today's events, the world may finally realize that our modern information- and often cloud-based society is built on a very fragile foundation that was not built for security or resilience.” (A Microsoft spokesperson did not directly respond to this assessment.)
In 2020, there was a surge in businesses going cashless in response to the pandemic, which disrupted the circulation of physical money. However, the ACLU has warned that cashless stores enable consumer surveillance and disproportionately impact low-income customers, who are less likely to have bank accounts and more likely to use cash. This has led, in part, to Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York passing legislation making it illegal for businesses to go entirely cashless.
