Power cut leaves card users in the lurch in Spain, Portugal

A massive blackout in Spain and Portugal on Monday left customers and businesses without means of electronic payment, brutally exposing the risks of completely moving away from cash.

The massive blackout affected everything from public transport to hospitals and manufacturing across the Iberian Peninsula.

According to Spanish newspaper El País, banks and payments systems were hit, with only some banks allowing payments through the point of sale (POS) terminals that they operate. Bank branches and ATMs are also closed.

However, the Bank of Spain said that, as of 3:30 p.m. local time, the national and cross-border payments system was working normally, and that any residual problems were down to a lack of back-up power available to bank branches, merchants or consumers. At retailers, it noted, the point-of-sale terminals used to process payments may have run out of battery.

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has actively tried to reduce the use of cash in Spain in recent years in an effort to reduce tax evasion. In 2021, Spain lowered the amount of physical cash that businesses could receive in a single transaction to €1,000 from €2,500.

However, according to European Central Bank data, Spain still boasts a relatively high degree of cash usage, which accounts for 57 percent of retail transactions. Around 39 percent of Spanish payments that aren’t online are done through either card or mobile apps.

The vulnerability of cashless payments to disruption — either unintentional or deliberate — hasn't gone unnoticed. Last month, Sweden’s central bank warned that it was important for resilience reasons for citizens to keep physical currency ready to use in case of emergency situations. Riksbank Governor Erik Thedéen referred to the “deteriorating security situation” in his comments, a nod to nearby Russia.

The incident comes only a few weeks after an equipment malfunction caused an outage lasting several hours at the European Central Bank’s TARGET system for processing wholesale payments. In this instance, however, the most important part of the eurozone’s financial plumbing continued to operate normally, the ECB said.