Payments and comms down
Cards, phones and the internet stop working
This is what most people mean now when they say cyber. It is much more boring, and much more manageable, than it sounds.
Rising. Payment outages, mobile network failures and attacks on utilities have all happened in the countries we cover, usually lasting hours rather than days.
What it looks like from your kitchen
Not sirens. A card that will not go through at the till, a banking app that will not open, a shop that has gone cash only, and a queue.
It is almost always hours, not days, and it is almost always fixed by people you will never hear about.
The only preparation that matters
- A small amount of cash, in small notes. Nobody can give you change for a fifty when the tills are down.
- Know one route home that does not need a maps app.
- Have one person outside your household who everyone knows to contact, so you are not all trying the same overloaded network to find each other.
- Keep a paper note of three phone numbers. Almost nobody can recite a phone number any more.
If your bank is down
Do not enter your details into anything that arrives by text or email during an outage. Outages are when fraud goes up, because everyone is expecting a message from their bank.
Your money is not gone. In the UK, the EU and the US, deposits are protected by law up to a set limit per person per bank. An outage is an outage, not a failure.
FSCS protects up to £85,000 per person per authorised firm.
What we are not going to tell you to do
We are not going to tell you to take your savings out. That is how people lose money, and a run is the one thing that turns a technical fault into a real problem.
If life is at risk, call 999 or 112 first. Everything on this page comes second.