As cash machines went off-line Friday night in Ames and across the state, students had nowhere to turn for quick cash, except for local grocery stores.

Dave Weintz, spokesman for Iowa Transfer Systems, Shazam’s parent company, said the primary and secondary switching cards, which are responsible for connecting all of Iowa’s ATMs, went out at about 9:50 p.m. Friday.

“We route our lines through the central U.S. West phone lines in Des Moines. Something knocked both the primary and secondary switching cards off-line and U.S. West didn’t fix them until about 1 a.m.,” Weintz said. “Total recovery on our end was later on Saturday.”

Weintz also said Shazam’s record of being on-line is very good.

“Over the last year, our up-time has run over 99.5 percent. We take these things very seriously,” Weintz said.

This proved to be a very sticky situation for students out having a good time on Friday night, and for Hy-Vee employees.

“I was really annoyed for an hour or so,” said Dan Quinn, a senior in physics and math. “I would have gone to a bank and taken out cash before 5 p.m. if I had known this was coming.”

“The only way I could get any money was to write a check out to Hy-Vee,” said Stefan Slagowski, a recent engineering science graduate of ISU.

This seemed to be the case for a large number of people as they went to Hy-Vee to write a check for cash.

Carey Lenning, an assistant floor manager for Hy-Vee who was working at the time of the shutdown, said Hy-Vee had to keep some customer service registers open for hours longer than usual to deal with the influx of customers.

“In addition to the ATMs going down, all the card scanners at our registers went down, so people couldn’t pay with their credit cards or bank cards,” Lenning said. “We had a lot of customers writing checks for cash, but we made sure the lines didn’t get too long.”

Weintz said that this sort of occurrence is uncommon. “We do strive to keep those ATMs in a ready state,” he said.

Weintz also said that, in addition to affecting all the cash machines in the state of Iowa, the shutdown also could have affected cash machines in border areas of other states.