Cash was king again after Rogers outage interrupts debit cards

On Friday, many business owners were surprised to find that their Interac debit machines were not working and that it wasn't just their machines.

That was part of a Canada-wide outage of Rogers services, which powers the Interac systems and put a stop to transactions.

It meant anyone looking to use debit cards over the weekend ran into problems.

Estevan Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Jackie Wall says that a few people were caught unaware when it was time to pay.

"Some people were already in line at the drive-thru, and did not have the cash to cover their order and they just had to drive away. It caught us all by surprise, and I think even the financial institutions were scrambling a bit, because you gotta keep the ATMs full of cash in that regard, and I'm sure the cash capacities were stretched."

ATMs were likely heavily used during this time, both the machines that are part of the banks downtown and the numerous private ones across the city.

Wall says in either case people may have had to pay up extra for the necessity of cash.

"What people probably did experience is that if they needed to get cash at an institution that was not where their account was, there's a lot of charges involved in that. So I'm sure that was frustrating for people as well," said Wall, "That maybe the nearest ATM or maybe the ATM they had access to was not from their financial institution, and then there are a lot of bank charges involved in that."

One group especially affected by the outage were young people, with Wall saying her own kids weren't immune.

"For young people - I have kids who don't have credit cards yet - that was an adjustment for them because they basically run cashless," said Wall, "There were some places where the policy was nothing over $50 bill, so when that's all you have that's an interesting situation as well."

Estevan eventually got back on track after the weekend and Wall says that the whole experience likely taught people to not be so reliant on debit cards.

"I think overall it was a real reality check for a lot of people, especially if they didn't have any access to credit cards. We're getting too, in my opinion, reliant on electronic forms of currency, and sometimes that's not very convenient."