Internet Outage Cuts Mobile Payment Option at Power Company

Recently, southern Mississippi residents discovered perhaps the biggest failing about mobile payments systems. No, it wasn’t a data breach or anything security-related, but rather an issue of backbone. A temporary glitch in Coast Electric’s phone and Internet access left it unable to accept mobile payments from its subscribers, leaving only cash or check as options to pay power bills.

Only payments brought to the offices will be accepted—mail doesn’t seem to be an option at last report—but Coast Electric is working hard with AT&T to get the glitches fixed so that normal service can kick back in. Sadly, there’s no timeline as yet on just when such a change will take place, so it could be a while yet before Coast Electric can take mobile payments again.

The good news, though, is for those who now need to pay a bill and have to use a less familiar payment system, there won’t be worries about collections right away. Coast Electric halted collections on Wednesday, so there may be some leeway for bill payers here. It also noted that some were using this outage as an opportunity to engage in fraud, as some scammers had crawled out of the woodwork to see if they could land some of those payments for their own.

It’s the one real downside of mobile payments. Some might cite security issues here instead, but it’s not really a matter of security that’s mobile payments truest weakness. It’s the fact that mobile payments must have power and a working network connection of some kind in order to fully operate. Without these things, mobile payments just don’t work, and no matter how many extra benefits are brought in—from rewards program operations to customer data tracking—it still can’t operate without that infrastructure.

It’s that comparative fragility that will likely make cash a holdout option for a long time to come. Security has been improving rapidly and the extra options only make a good situation better. But when the lights go out or the phone goes dead, mobile payments just can’t hold up. At least, for now.