By Peter Kent
The recent technical glitch that left Barclays customers unable to use their cards demonstrated society's heavy reliance on plastic.
According to the BBC's Kevin Peachey, many people were thrown when their cards could not be used to make withdrawals or transactions for several hours earlier this week.
Many people contacted the BBC to share their experiences and Mr Peachey noted that none of them were carrying chequebooks and were stuck without instant cash access.
Remembering that a similar episode happened recently with Nationwide when customers could not use their online accounts, Mr Peachey wrote: "These episodes have shown us how successful the switch from cheques and visiting the local branch to online payments and card transactions has been."
Barclays said that the problem had been traced to a computer centre in Gloucester and that it had been caused by a "disk array".
It apologised for the glitch.
Recently, Barclays reported improvements that it has been making for mobile banking, such as presenting information to fit better into a mobile phone browser.
