Natwest crash - what happened

LincolnshireYokel

Apparently a junior technician in India caused the RBS meltdown The bloke was carrying out an upgrade to the CA-7 software the bank used to run the transaction processing. As he checked the update, he accidentally cleared the entire job queue, ie he erased all the scheduling. The deleted rescheduling data had to be painstakingly re-entered into the bank group’s computer system, stalling 100million transactions.

A major brown pant 'o sh*t' moment.................I can imagine him going white with fear hen he frantically checked the job queue and it said 'QUEUE EMPTY'............

John_Gray

You might have credited The Register, which has had a few knowledgeable stories on this topic...

Mr_Thrifty

So much for "helpful banking".

I wonder what their "independent review" will say about all of this.

And blaming a single individual sounds like baloney to me. Aren't banks supposed to have procedures in place to ensure that this sort of thing cannot happen, even if somebody actually deliberately tries to wreck it all, let alone clicks a few wrong buttons by accident? It all sounds a bit flakey to me.

Duk

Well, Nice to know my money is in safe hands

timberflake

Just goes to show that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

We use offshore in my line of work and they are nothing short of incompentant.

Anyone that says offshoring work saves money is wrong, plain and simple. The amount of re-work required to correct their mistakes is unreal.

InsideInsurance

John_Gray wrote: »

You might have credited The Register, which has had a few knowledgeable stories on this topic...

It also has a lot of wrong information about this topic too. I dont have any insider knowledge of the issue but when their claimed insider are making basic errors about facts it does throw into question the other information in the reports.

Having worked with banking systems it fundamentally doesnt feel right that a junior developer is able to delete a complete system with there being no way of restoring it other than rekeying thousands of jobs

Mr_Thrifty

InsideInsurance wrote: »

It also has a lot of wrong information about this topic too. I dont have any insider knowledge of the issue but when their claimed insider are making basic errors about facts it does throw into question the other information in the reports.

Having worked with banking systems it fundamentally doesnt feel right that a junior developer is able to delete a complete system with there being no way of restoring it other than rekeying thousands of jobs

Yeah, sounds suspicious to me. I very much doubt a bank operates in such a "fly by night" sort of way. It just sounds so... well, amateurish? I thought banks were supposed to be more secure and robust than that?

vax2002

The rumour inside is they ran out of cash.

LincolnshireYokel

Mr_Thrifty wrote: »

Yeah, sounds suspicious to me. I very much doubt a bank operates in such a "fly by night" sort of way. It just sounds so... well, amateurish? I thought banks were supposed to be more secure and robust than that?

Seems credible to me. If the systems creates a dynamic job queue whilst processing transactions, then deleteing the queue would certainly throw a major spanner in the works, as well as making the original queue pretty f*cking difficult to recreate.

zaax

Why, precisely, does one mess-up by one employee in front of one computer put your ENTIRE BANKING SYSTEM out of action, nationwide?

paddyrg

Mr_Thrifty wrote: »

Yeah, sounds suspicious to me. I very much doubt a bank operates in such a "fly by night" sort of way. It just sounds so... well, amateurish? I thought banks were supposed to be more secure and robust than that?

I refer you to my post here http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.php?p=54019271&postcount=44

This is how *every* large and complex system grows. Not at all suspicious, it sounds absolutely spot-on to me.