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Co-op in meltdown

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Comments

  • pmduk
    pmduk Posts: 10,707 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    Nobody, even NASA, can guarantee that technology will never have downtime. For a transaction to work, you have the retailer's technology, the payment processor's technology, the card issuer's technology, and phone/data networks between each link in the chain. Not to mention the physical condition of the card in your care, Anyone of these can fail at any time.
  • pqrdef
    pqrdef Posts: 4,552 Forumite
    pmduk wrote: »
    Nobody, even NASA, can guarantee that technology will never have downtime. For a transaction to work, you have the retailer's technology, the payment processor's technology, the card issuer's technology, and phone/data networks between each link in the chain. Not to mention the physical condition of the card in your care, Anyone of these can fail at any time.
    Well it doesn't help that there are too many fingers in the pie and the whole system is over-elaborate. But there are too many single points of failure where there should be backups.

    Can I even have a backup card? Probably not. And if I damage my card I'll probably have to wait about a week for another one, though if that doesn't arrive it'll be another week.

    If card authorisation is down, it's not rocket science to switch to a backup system. I bet NASA has some backup systems. If the backup system can't check account data, it'll just have to say an automatic yes to all requests. There might be some financial risk to the bank in that, but that would be their problem. Maintaining the service should be the priority.
    "It will take, five, 10, 15 years to get back to where we need to be. But it's no longer the individual banks that are in the wrong, it's the banking industry as a whole." - Steven Cooper, head of personal and business banking at Barclays, talking to Martin Lewis
  • pmduk
    pmduk Posts: 10,707 Forumite
    Part of the Furniture 10,000 Posts Photogenic Name Dropper
    Who do you think would pay the bill for all of that? There has to be a balance between the investment involved and the potential use to be made. These outages are relatively rare, keep them in proportion.
  • dalesrider
    dalesrider Posts: 3,447 Forumite
    pqrdef wrote: »
    Well it doesn't help that there are too many fingers in the pie and the whole system is over-elaborate. But there are too many single points of failure where there should be backups.

    What elaborate about the path now.
    Card-Retailer-auth center-bank

    4 steps.
    Not really possible to make it any shorter.
    pqrdef wrote: »
    If card authorisation is down, it's not rocket science to switch to a backup system. I bet NASA has some backup systems. If the backup system can't check account data, it'll just have to say an automatic yes to all requests. .

    Apollo 13 anyone.....

    You might be surprised that there is a max time before transactions are automatically approved.
    But this does need a connection between parties to work.
    Biggest issue is often the link between each party.

    I once ran a website that was hosted with a company with triple redundancy in case of problems....
    Totally useless as some muppet digging up the road severed ALL the telephone conncetions to the exchange.

    Remember we can still use cash. So the OP's issue of train ticket could have been resolved by purchasing at the station with good old hard cash. :D
    Never ASSUME anything its makes a
    >>> A55 of U & ME <<<
  • pqrdef
    pqrdef Posts: 4,552 Forumite
    dalesrider wrote: »
    Remember we can still use cash. So the OP's issue of train ticket could have been resolved by purchasing at the station with good old hard cash.
    Is that the banks' official response? Remember we could do without them?

    Farcical.

    The banks put a lot of effort into persuading employers to pay wages through banks, and persuading the rest of us to use debit cards.
    "It will take, five, 10, 15 years to get back to where we need to be. But it's no longer the individual banks that are in the wrong, it's the banking industry as a whole." - Steven Cooper, head of personal and business banking at Barclays, talking to Martin Lewis
  • dalesrider
    dalesrider Posts: 3,447 Forumite
    No...

    It a common sense approach.

    It is all about using alternatives when something does not work.
    Never ASSUME anything its makes a
    >>> A55 of U & ME <<<
  • rb10
    rb10 Posts: 6,334 Forumite
    pqrdef wrote: »
    Numbers are neither here nor there.

    Numbers are key to it. Something that affects lots of people (e.g. Natwest's failure) is more likely to reach the news than something that only affects a few.
  • innovate
    innovate Posts: 16,217 Forumite
    10,000 Posts Combo Breaker
    pqrdef wrote: »
    Is that the banks' official response? Remember we could do without them?

    ooooh now you are talking. How could we do without banks? Just don't say bitcoins or some other unregulated idea.
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