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Comment by Victerius | Hacker News Reader

Interac is down because Interac uses Rogers' network.

Interac's backup network also happens to be with ... Rogers.

Canadians across the country can't use debit cards, regardless of their financial institution. Credit and cash only. E-transfers are unavailable. Fun for people trying to pay their bills online.

And that's just the financial side of the situation. Millions of people have lost Internet and phone service.

Someone on Reddit wrote: "Maybe the worst part is that they have literally no open lines of communication. No twitter posts. All chat options (twitter, IG, FB, web based) are all unresponsive. Can’t call tech support, as the call will fail. Can’t even call billing or general inquires as it’s the same thing. Shit happens, I get it. But to leave your customers completely in the dark? Brutal. Just brutal."

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It's hard to understate the impact of this across all of Canada. As someone who uses Apple Pay for almost every transaction, this underlines the fragility of a "cashless society."

Also, around half my team are unable to effectively work today. We all work remote, and half the team's home internet is on Rogers, which is down. Some people are tethering, but people who are also on Rogers for their wireless are out of luck.

I'm not a Rogers customer anymore, but my boss showed me how you can't even login to their account anymore. Their website is down too, just timing out.

Funny, I left Rogers last year and just last night a telemarketer phoned me asking me to return to Rogers. What a sign that I made the right call by politely refusing.

> It's hard to understate the impact of this across all of Canada. As someone who uses Apple Pay for almost every transaction, this underlines the fragility of a "cashless society."

It seems like Bitcoin and crypto fared well during this outage.

If you could get on the internet to transact your crypto, that is.

You can if you use cellular data to transact with Bitcoin, not everyone is using the Rogers network, but the banks in Canada were.

So no online banking, withdrawals, payments in affected parts Canada.

> this underlines the fragility of a "cashless society."

And a society that refuses to invest in robust infrastructure.

You don't need an internet connection to use Apple Pay. Unless you mean you didn't use credit cards before, the situation has been the same for the last 20-30 years when we stopped using carbon paper imprints.

The payment terminal still needs internet access to process your Apple Pay transaction

It does not for credit. Credit transactions can be batched offline and transmitted when things come back online. Debit must be online, though.

What happens if the transaction is over credit limit or if someone uses a fake (once valid but now cancelled, generated, etc) card?

Imagine Bell was down too. What then?

I really hope this results in the CRTC starting to allow more competition. I hope, but I'm not optimistic.

I think we're most likely going to see them using this as justification to let Rogers get their way even more. Maybe the CRTC will try to convince the rest of the government that it's a reason to give away more cash and preferential treatment to Rogers and Bell as well.

I'd suggest giving the CRTC a call with your thoughts... but their phone system is down :)

https://twitter.com/CRTCeng/status/1545421218534359041

applepay works fine. not on the interac network.

Does Apple Pay work even with debit transactions?

It likely only works with credit cards.

Tethering with Canadian data prices is..spicy. A Zoom call uses about a gig per hour with HD cameras, and you typically get about 10 gigs of data per month. Overages charged at one firstborn per gig

Its crazy that interac does not have backup independent connectivity.

Truly, and hopefully this leads to change. But this is also a consequence of Canada's lack of competition with ISPs.

To a certain extent yes. But its not like rogers literally has a monopoly. The isp i use is doing fine.

When there is so little choice, it's essentially an Oligopoly.

As long as there are at least 2 choices, it should be possible to have an independent backup.

Apparently it does - with another Rogers connection.

They probably bought into SLA clauses claiming Rogers won't have maintenance downtime on both circuits at the same time. That shouldn't be an excuse not to have a backup with another provider.

It's hard to believe these jamokes don't have redundant providers. It's something I roll out to even my smallest consulting client...

They have a system-wide outage. How can tech support help in any way?

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