Archive for Interac

Interac Is Apparently Down…. Again

Posted in Commentary with tags on July 14, 2022 by itnerd

After being caught up in the Rogers outage because they apparently are completely reliant on Rogers, though they plan to fix that, news is filtering through via Down Detector that Interac who handles debit card payments for Canada is down again:

Apparently credit cards are still working and good old cash works as well. But that’s not enough to make people happy:

I had a look at Interac’s Twitter feed and they haven’t acknowledged an outage. But clearly something is going on. Thus sooner or later they will have to say something. And hopefully they get the same level of scrutiny from the federal government that Rogers is getting at the moment because two outages in a week and having a lack of redundancy is not acceptable.

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Interac To Add A New “Supplier” To Keep From Going Down… Which Is A Backhanded Admission That They Are Totally Reliant On Rogers At Present

Posted in Commentary with tags , on July 10, 2022 by itnerd

One of the things that affected a lot of Canadians was the fact that they were unable to use their debit cards during the Rogers outage on Friday. That’s because debit card transactions are processed through the Interac system in Canada. And clearly that system is dependant on Rogers as they went down about as hard as Rogers did. But clearly that’s not cool for Interac any more as they put out these pair of curious Tweets yesterday:

What’s curious about these Tweets is this sentence:

“We are adding a supplier to strengthen our existing network redundancy so Canadians can continue to rely on Interac daily.”

Let’s think about that for a second. If they actually had redundancy, then debit card transactions would have been processed on Friday and I wouldn’t be talking about this now. Thus the logical conclusion is that they had zero redundancy. And now the blowback from that is so bad that they’ve had no choice but to up their game. You have to wonder why it takes two outages from Rogers in a 15 month timeframe for Interac to decide that having a second telco supplier just in case Rogers goes down again is a viable strategy. Clearly someone at Interac isn’t on top of their game.

And it begs the question: Should all businesses who rely on Rogers have a second telco just in case Rogers tanks again? I can assure you that this is a question that is being asked across Canada right now.

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