Cash-strapped taxi passengers were out of luck yesterday after the system that wirelessly links to credit-card fare machines in thousand of cabs went down for hours.

A partial hardware failure caused the system that services about 6,000 cabbies to crash at about 2 p.m.

The outage extended through the rush hour.

The breakdown left many passengers with no way to pay their fare.

“People were mad,” said a cabby in Midtown last night. “One man was fighting with me. He said, ‘I don’t wanna pay you. I have no cash.’ ”

The system suffered a similar outage in January when a glitch caused machines to go down for an entire day.

The credit-card fare system, installed in 2004, fully came back online at about 9:15 p.m., said a spokesman for the company that runs it.