Friday’s credit card outage shows how vulnerable NJ is (Opinion)

Ever feel we are sometimes too reliant on technology? I’m sure many in New Jersey did Friday afternoon. This didn’t receive much mainstream media attention but it was all over social media.

Indeed not only were people making purchases scrambling by paying with checks there was an above normal run on atms for cash withdrawals.

It’s being called a major outage of credit and debit cards, both Visa and Mastercard. Chase Bank runs the network that handles these and was having major problems.

It inconvenienced customers not only across New Jersey but also in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky and beyond.

I remember the Northeast blackout of 2003 that affected not only that part of the country but extended all the way out to Michigan where I lived at the time. I was trying to buy bags of ice at a 7-Eleven, as was everybody trying to save the food in their now useless refrigerators.

The store of course couldn’t process anything electronically. It was a cash-only situation for which most people were unprepared. Customers were screaming at workers for not having the old-fashioned carbon paper swipe machines. It was bedlam.

A major technology fail recently hit my boys’ ophthalmologist’s office. They were so reliant on technology with no backup system that when it crashed and burned, they couldn’t make new appointments, couldn’t access patient records, couldn’t look up a past prescription or do any function of business. It shut them down literally for weeks.

We’ve gotten so used to technology always being there for us that society can come to a grinding halt when it fails. And it is in that moment we see just how much of technology’s slave we have become.

Opinions expressed in the post above are those of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Jeff Deminski only.

You can now listen to Deminski & Doyle — On Demand! Hear New Jersey’s favorite afternoon radio show any day of the week. Download the Deminski & Doyle show wherever you get podcasts, on our free app, or listen right now.

Click here to contact an editor about feedback or a correction for this story.