[pgsandstrom]

I work at a swedish bank. We spend very much time and effort to prepare for different situations such as that. Some preparation is required by the EU Dora act: https://www.digital-operational-resilience-act.com/ (yes I know that HN hates all EU regulations)

Being a cashless society does require some extra emergency planning, but I feel confident that Sweden has prepared as well as you could ever expect for such a crisis.

[Brian_K_White]

What preparations that a bank does in any way helps all the actual people out in the world?

The net is inaccessible in a way the bank can't fix. Broken cables or something cuts off a whole area even if the bank and the city the bank is in are up.

Is there an established fallback that everyone knows about and is ready to use?

Credit cards used to have a fallback methilod (which was the primary method originally), where if the pos system is out, a business can still process a transaction off-line by taking an impression of your card with a carbonless receipt in this purely mechanical device. The receipts are all deposited at the bank at a later time.

Unless there is some fallback like that that's actually ready to go and everyone is ready to use when needed, then how do you buy soup and heating fuel? Hand written IOU's?

Every time I've seen a payment system unavailable, the various goods and services simply stopped. Even food and fuel. At all big and little scales.

Here in the US a few years ago hackers took down some computers relating to a major oil pipe. For something like a few weeks a big chunk of the country couldn't get fuel. It later came out that the computers that were affected were only related to billing, NOT anything about actually operating the pipe. Fuel could have been flowing the whole time. Rather than allow any tiny chance of a billing discrepency, they stopped the flow and let everyone freeze and starve and die from lack of ambulances etc. (a little hyperbole, idk if anyone actually died that could be tied back to the fuel cutoff)

This and other examples tells me that when "merely the billing" is down, that the goods and services stop too, and all of them, not just the luxuries. It is not valid to propose that grocery stores and gas stations will switch to some emergency humanitarian mode of operation for the duration of an emergency and figure out the crass money later.