Hacker News Reader

Comment by zipwitch | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't just emergency calls. Most Centurylink service around the US was down intermittently yesterday.

A lot of Centurylink circuits are still down in Arizona, and if not down completely, have significant packet loss.

A friend texted me that his POS systems that rely on CenturyLink in Nevada have been down for two days. The stores can only do transactions in cash.

Makes you think twice about the cashless utopia the HN crowd imagines.

Makes me think we should be investing in redundancies (one of which is cash, but also in our electronic networks).

Or to switch to crypto currency that is distributed and eventually consistant

I swear the swiftness with which people swoop into these kinds of threads to suggest crypto/blockchain is bordering on becoming a meme.

If the network is fully down, I don't see how the scenario for this business owner changes with blockchain, they'd have the exact same problem with a register that can't close an ACH: backlogged transactions that need to catch up eventually, meaning some card types are going to decline if the POS can't reach a clearing house utilized by the card vendor.

Even if you wait for 15 confirmations, that's easily fufilled by the others in a market.

Similarly, for it to make it to the chain only 1 of those 15 confirmations has to connect to any larger network sometime in the future.

Can confirm, we've had major issues with calls and call quality across our offices the past couple of days and I have been getting periodic updates from Centurylink about their status in regards to our circuits in my email. Major clients have been effected by this.

Central Kansas reporting. For a short time (hours/minutes, wasn't home, got a text from Dad) the normally 6Mbps CenturyLink DSL was down to 0.14 Mbps.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com