Obviously this is about the power outage in Spain.
While normally, if a card declines, people would probably have to leave their IDs with the restaurant while they went to get a withdrawl from their bank; this is a power outage, withdrawls wouldn’t work. It would be silly to arrest people because of a power outage. So I’m assuming people just have to give the restaurant owner/management their identity info with a promise to pay?
And power outages shouldn’t affect buses, since they run on gasoline/diesel, but the payment system processing transit passes might not work. Do buses still get run during a power outage and they just let people on for free, or do they just shut down the bus lines?
Off the top of my head in no particular order:
Essentially society as we know it stops, at least for a while. Generators are used, but are often of limited use, since getting fuel to them is non-trivial and many are scaled for short outages.
Without knowing what happened in Spain, I can say that events like this can and do happen around the world. It’s likely that this will increase.
Given how interconnected the electricity grid is, I’m surprised that this didn’t cascade across Europe.
Switched telephone networks run on lead-acid batteries, they will last for a few days without power.
Hospitals, airports and tower blocks have back up generators, although in the case of hosiptals, people on respirators can sometimes die as the generator takes a while to build up voltage.