Why is my finances dependent on Beeline?

Today in the morning, what the Bolsheviks had been talking about for so long that could have been foreseen was happening: Beeline had a problem with the delivery of (part) SMS, and, suddenly, for Beeline customers, authorization via SMS broke.







We all know how unpleasant it is when a large system stops working as it should. And the larger the system, the more difficult it can then be to launch. With SMS, the problem today is at least in the morning, and, for sure, the engineers of the company do not sit idle this time - only hundreds and thousands of people who can’t enter the services (because they have 2FA enabled) cannot make payments on the Internet ( because “3-D Secure” and others like it are used), they may not receive notification of flight transfer at the airport, or an alert from their own Zabbix — these people want to say a quiet kindly word, or even a few.



But I write not only to blame Beeline for something. They will fix SMS messages as soon as they can, I'm sure of that. I’m much more interested in the situation itself: you and I so much rely on 2FA and, in general, “checks on another channel”, that we forget that this channel should be reliable, and, ideally, also duplicated. Otherwise, we simply add another not absolutely reliable component to the system, and the probability of a system failure with 2FA is greater than we would like. Yes, 2FA is safer, but (as this situation shows), no, not more reliable.



It seems that mobile companies should consider reserving SMS delivery through push, or something else (apart from sending via Russian Post, of course). By the way, it’s interesting that I didn’t succeed in entering the Alfa-Bank LC (I did not wait for SMS), but Sberbank entered the LC well (SMS came in). Perhaps lucky, of course. It is characteristic, by the way, that in Alpha and in Tinkov (for example) I have pushes enabled, but 3-D Secure did not use them when trying to verify the payment - only SMS.



In the photo - "striped flies, rear view." For me personally, the situation today looks just like that.



UPD: Beeline reported that “just” had a problem. But the queue for sending will be raked for some time, and only then new SMS will be sent without delay, but for now - it’s better to be patient.



UPD2: Regarding answers like “If you have a complaint about the work of a bank or other service, you can contact this service or stop using it” I can immediately clarify: the problem is not in one bank, but in that there is one element (mobile operator) ) can (s could) break the work of so many people, because when it fails, the confirmation is not transmitted in any other way. And the particular bank is not to blame much here, they use SMS as a given, believing in their reliability - just like many other companies, not only banks.



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