Short answer
Crypto payments need an internet connection to confirm, so a full outage pauses them the same way it pauses card terminals. The practical fix is a phone's cellular hotspot as backup, and the firm rule is simple: no confirmation, no goods.
A simple outage plan
- Keep a phone with cellular data as a hotspot fallback for the register device.
- If nothing works, treat crypto as temporarily unavailable, exactly like a card outage.
- Never hand over goods against a payment you have not seen confirm on screen.
Cash is the other fallback. Crypto sits alongside your existing methods, so an outage in one does not have to stop a sale.
Common misconceptions
- That crypto works fully offline. Confirming a payment requires a connection.
Things to avoid
- Trusting a 'pending' screen during a bad connection. Wait for a real confirmation.