The Barclays IT glitch exposes a major flaw in our cashless society

You know the old adage about it being better to stash your money under the bed than in the bank? We wouldn’t recommend stuffing your life savings into a suitcase, but it might be worth keeping a couple of hundred ready to go – because even our cashless society isn’t immune to an IT glitch. And when people took to X to complain, the bank suggested asking friends and family for help – failing that, the Trussell Trust, which is the nation’s biggest operator of food banks. This was a mercifully short snafu and even the Barclays outage pales by comparison to the disastrous situation at TSB a few years ago, when the botched migration of its customer records from a platform operated by Lloyds to one provided by Spanish parent Sabadell went badly wrong and left some customers locked out for a week or more. “Technical issues like these could be devastating for people who could miss important bill payments, find themselves unable to pay for essential services or risk going overdrawn – issues which could come with knock-on effects like late payment or overdraft penalties, or affect their ability to get credit or borrow money,” said Jenny Ross, editor of Which?