Bitcoin wasn't down. Hasn't had a single hour of downtime or hack since it started 15 years ago in 2008. No bank holidays. Clear and transparent supply, 100% open source code. Not run by any single government, corporate board, or CEO. Sends money across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees, all you need is a phone. Powerful stuff.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

The original article contains 416 words, the summary contains 135 words. Saved 68%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Would Taler be more resilient than a typical EMV/AmEx card? It's designed as an online payment system but it's less centralised, so that could help.

It's already an attractive project due to its privacy feature, and due to it being more regulation-friendly that cryptocurrencies. If it's resilient enough it could act as a digital cash.