The days appear mostly to be over when people routinely used a check to pay for their mortgage, utilities and various products and services like groceries, shoes and car servicing.

Likewise it appears to be rare that a group of friends all pitch in $20 after dining together at a restaurant.

So many of those transactions now are electronic.

But those systems are not infallible, and when they’re down, there are problems.

A new report in the Federalist pointed out the problem for small businesses this week when the popular payment system, Square, failed.

Millions of business had to halt doing business with their customers, unless those customers were carrying cash.

“An estimated 64 million small businesses use Square to facilitate credit card transactions, pull sales reports, review profit percentages, and manage inventory. A disruption that began midday on Thursday, however, left those customers without the ability to run their businesses effectively unless clients paid cash.”

The company, hours later at the close of the business day, did in fact, admit that it was “experiencing issues with multiple Square services.”

It explained, “We understand how important it is for your business that our services be up and running, and we are actively working toward a fix.”

No explanation for the system failure was offered.

The Federalist report noted that other computer systems offering payment options, Apple Pay, Paypal, Visa, Zelle, Cash App and Venmo, also reported various issues with their operations at the same time.

A report at PJMedia explained users in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Japan, Australia, France and Spain here hit by the outages.

“Without the ability to process credit cards, many businesses have reported turning away customers who don’t have cash—or taking an enormous risk and writing down credit card information to process later, not knowing if the card will go through. Despite Square’s customers losing thousands of dollars per hour, their customer service line was shut down and goes directly to a voice message that says the service line is unavailable,” the report said.

Online, Ken Obloy noted, “So Square goes down completely leaving every business using their service effectively shut off from payments and they close the support during this? How many of my fellow small businesses are shopping for new merchant services today?”

The report warned, “It should be noted that this situation is why a cashless society that relies on digital currency is doomed to be a massive failure. Cash is king. Don’t let them convince you otherwise unless you want to be trapped with no way to pay for what you need, no way to access your funds, and no one answering the ‘customer service’ line.”

Mid-day Friday came word that Square was “starting” to restore its operations.