While stepping up to buy tickets at the cinema on Friday evening, I had a moment of panic. As I shuffled to the front of the line, two signs glared at me: one declared the venue was cash-free, the other that card payment terminals were down. Comedic in retrospect, a dilemma at the moment.

I breathed a sigh of relief when the man at the box office assured me they were accepting card payments. “That,” he said, pointing to the second sign, “was just during the outage.” I felt my heart rate steady – until he flashed me a knowing smile as I asked for tickets to Yorgos Lanthimos’ absurdist black comedy Kinds of Kindness. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s weird. And deeply unsettling.)

The point of the film isn’t immediately apparent – at least to an amateur like me. But there was one line that got me thinking. Paraphrased, it was this: it’s better to rely on something consistently available, rather than something that depletes each day. Now, how does this relate to CrowdStrike’s outage? Bear with me.

Over the past decade, cash – and cash use – has been dwindling. At the end of the 2022-23 financial year, the total value of cash in circulation fell by almost $1.1 billion to $101.3 billion – the smallest amount since November 2019. And cash usage has plunged from about one-third of transactions in 2019 to just 16 per cent in 2022. At the same time, many venues are switching to “cashless” trading.

Meanwhile, in 2022, 76 per cent of payments were made by card, up from 63 per cent in 2019. An additional 7 per cent were made through BPAY, internet or phone banking and PayPal, with only 13 per cent made through cash.

While cash is not yet at the point of being depleted, there are signs it’s on the way out. Treasurer Jim Chalmers last year vowed to keep notes flowing, but as cash usage has fallen, cash transportation has become a less profitable business. So much so that the competition watchdog let Armaguard merge with its biggest rival last year, creating a near monopoly. Even then, the company struggled. In June, big banks, retail giants and Australia Post threw Armaguard a $50 million lifeline to keep it supplying cash.

Cash is important – especially for the homeless, domestic violence victims and other vulnerable people who may not have easy access to electronic or card payments. Until this week, it was these people that the debate around keeping cash in circulation focused on. But the CrowdStrike outage changed that. Sure, it might be the first time we’ve had an outage of such incredible scale. But it was a wake-up call. Millions of people across Australia, even just for a couple of hours, lost the ability to make payments, catch flights and use their laptops.

In our drive for efficiency and scale, we’ve sometimes trampled over the value of having multiple competing options. That’s not just in terms of payment options but also when it comes to companies – especially with the rise of the tech giants.