Comment by rigrassm

> So people can't log into their bank website for a few hours, banks used to only be open for like 4 hours a day and somehow we all survived.

1. I believe it's payment processing systems not functioning properly that causes real problems for people and not simply bank websites being down. Especially given...

2. Banks being closed so much back when cash/checks were actually widely used wasn't an issue because you could just pop over to an ATM or whip out a checkbook. In today's system, every single purchase you make requires communication between the merchant, your bank, and any number of middlemen via the internet.

Yeah, cash is still used today but I've been noticing even things like school sports events have stopped taking cash all together and simply post a QR code to buy from your phone.

That is unless the school has crap cell reception (with no public Wi-Fi either!), Cloudflare shits the bed, Visa thinks you're buying porn, you locked your debit card and now can't unlock it cuz the website is down, or any one of the million things that break all the time. Replace school sports event with literally every single things that requires a financial transaction and it's easy to see how even a short outage can lead to actual harm being realized.