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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

Those apps can all be replaced by a website, and most banks already have those websites, which means if all the banking apps on earth stopped working right now the solution wouldn't involve anything more complicated than stabbing your finger at different icon on your phone and typing the name of your bank into a search engine.

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There are very few things that would cause banking apps to stop working while their websites continue to function.

Presumably it'd be the loss of mobile service and/or GPS that would cause every banking app in the UK to fail, but I'm a bit skeptical that either one of those is a strict requirement.

not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

> not being funny - if the internet goes out how does a website make this better?

The internet for most people doesn't depend on banking apps, or satellites. Wifi would still work great. If the internet actually did go out everywhere, how would an app help you?

The UK is an island nation that's reliant on undersea cables. If those cables are cut (which is something that Russia seems to threaten) your only fallback is satellite connectivity - so protecting that connectivity is pretty key to ensuring e.g people can access their money.

I would guess that was how Wes Streeting was briefed (and then completely bungled in public comms).

ideally British banks would have their infrastructure located in Britain and therefore would not rely on undersea cables

Monzo (a major UK bank) use AWS and GCP. Hopefully their DCs don't fail in some way when losing access to the outside world but I would hazard a guess something goes wrong.

https://monzo.com/blog/tolerating-full-cloud-outages-with-mo...

Thats the point, the reasons the apps dont work would be the same reason the websites dont work. They are not work around, I think apps is just mentioned because 90% of people use them over the website

Banking apps don't depend on satellites, either.

I think this comment is the tech equivalent of "if they can't eat bread, let them eat cake"

That would imply that somehow a bank's website was a less accessible option than the app is, when the app is dependent on a mobile device as opposed to the website which is avilable on virtually any device with a browser including the same mobile device the app is installed on.

That’s beyond about 90% of the population.

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