Surprise!! There's a Run on Canadian Banks

There must have been a very large number of large withdrawals.

I tried to withdraw $20 000 in cash from my bank today. They would only give me half, due to their “reserves being very low”. They were out of $100 dollar bills, gave me $50’s instead. They said the next cash shipment to them was on the 23rd. Later in the day they called me and said the next cash shipment wouldn’t be until March 2nd. I bank at RBC, the biggest bank in Canada. My boss ran into the same thing at TD, another big Canadian bank.---quoted at Vox

Since there is no link, one suspects it was an email communication.

Generally, banks have a lot of cash in the vault.  That's why there are bank robberies.  For a bank to be "out" of  $100's and not expecting another cash shipment for a week----that's a bit odd.

In the alternative:  wouldn't surprise me in the least to find that the bank actually DID have plenty of large bills--but that they were instructed not to give them out.