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Guides/Planning

Cyber outage:
cards, cash and comms

The newest emergency is the one with no weather. A bank's app down for a day, a supermarket's tills offline, a mobile network out across a region. Nothing is broken in your house, and yet you cannot buy milk or call your mother. The fix is paper and coins.

6 min readChecked against National Cyber Security Centre and gov.uk guidanceUpdated November 2026Print this guide
Todayonce

Twenty minutes of paper

  1. Print a contacts card: family, the school, the GP, the vet, your bank's phone number, your insurer, the out-of-area contact. One copy in each bag's document pouch, one on the fridge. Phones die and apps need a signal; paper doesn't.
  2. Keep £50 to £100 in small notes and coins in the document pouch. In an outage the shop that stays open is the one that takes cash, and nobody can change a fifty.
  3. Keep a paper map of your area in the bag. Satnav and maps apps stop with the signal.
  4. Know what a scam looks like in a crisis. Outages are followed by texts and calls pretending to be your bank. Your bank will never ask you to move money to a 'safe account'.
Duringthe outage

Slow down, go analogue

  1. Check whether it's you, your provider or everyone: the radio in the lid will tell you if it's national. Don't reinstall apps or reset passwords in a panic; that's when mistakes happen.
  2. Pay cash, keep receipts, and buy only what you need for two days. Panic-buying is what turns an outage into a shortage.
  3. If mobile networks are down, texts often get through before calls, and Wi-Fi calling may still work at home. Agree a check-in time with the family rather than trying every ten minutes.
  4. For an emergency, 999 works from any network, including one you aren't a customer of, and from a phone with no SIM.

Never

Never give a one-time code, a PIN or a password to anyone who calls you, however urgent they sound and whatever number they appear to call from. Hang up, wait five minutes, and call the number on the back of your card.

Afterit's back

Check before you trust

  1. Check your bank statements for the days around the outage, and your email for password-reset messages you didn't ask for.
  2. Change the password on anything that behaved strangely, and turn on two-step verification if you hadn't.
  3. Top the cash back up. Replace the receipts in the pouch with the contacts card. Done.

Sources, checked November 2026