Hit by Lloyds, Halifax, TSB and Bank of Scotland glitch? Your rights explained

chanz4

Soon to come, paid banking

Organist

Systems do fail and 100% failsafe is virtually impossible. The quote about the aeroplane is interesting considering the air traffic control problems of a few weeks ago.

I agree with the comments about the compensation cluture it appears that "real" accidents can't happen these days. Look at the power failures over Christmas caused by bad weather with engineers working flat out to get services back as soon as possible. No thanks there though from the majority of people just complaints and how much can we get. If the power companies could only have diverted the bad weather away from the UK . Obviously something to consider for their next AGM.

Come on MSE compensation for real loss OK but please get off the let's see what we can screw out of the Banks etc. bandwagon.

gjchester

Archi_Bald wrote: »

A 3-hour outage for a mission critical banking system is about 2 hours and 55 minutes too much, and it doesn't cost vast amounts of money to achieve "seven nines", or even just "two nines" availability..

Two nines is three days a year, they were clearly within that.


The problem is 'Nines' rating are expected service outages, like the Mean Time Between Failures" its a measure of the expected time of downtime/failure, NOT a guarantee that's the case.


Odd as it sounds adding more backups and redundancy does not automatically make a system more reliable.


Microsoft and Amazon Cloud services have both experienced downtime due to unexpected problems, and both spend far more money on their infrastructure than a bank.

Archi_Bald wrote: »

You wouldn't expect an aeroplane to fail for a few hours on the way from London to Tokyo. Or a life support unit in an intensive care unit. Both are of course more important than an ATM network since there is an immediate danger to life, but both are examples of affordable "seven nines" availability..

Neither generally run 24x7x365 and there's always the possibility of external interference causing the issue. Planes do fail, remember the airbus that flew into trees in France at an airshow. It was a demonstrator flight to show the computers were always in control, but the pilot overrode safety margins and the computers could not handle the situation. The French Concorde was victim to an external event, it wasn't a problem in the system but something outside that created the failure.

Archi_Bald wrote: »

Thus the excuse that it it would be too expensive for a bank to provide the highest availability is exactly that - an excuse.

It may be, but there's always a business case. Look at your PC you wrote this on, most people will be on a £3-400 or so home computer, if it breaks they curse, and get it repaired.


You can make that more available, by raiding the hard drive, then you need to duplicate the whole system board so if the CPU fails it can fall over. Then multiple monitors, and keyboards/mouse etc.
But continuing the thoughts you then need dual power supplies, ideally from different substations, and they also need to be on UPS's again with redundancy, and finally two network connection, again to different exchanges (or Virgin and a BT solution).


No-one is likely to do that at home, the cost isn't worth it just for your home PC, but you can see to take a system from two nines to five or more nines will add up the cost.

Mat_Lock

I didn't even know there was an outage so I feel very distressed that I wasn't alerted to this and might not have been able to play online bingo on Sunday.

Where's my £150 Halifax !!!!

/irony mode off

opinions4u

Apology message on my online banking just now.

Included a contact number. 0845 alongside a geographical option. Quite sporting of them.

sandco

I was in wetherspoons with family on Sunday paying for a 'cheapish' round of drinks.
My (new) TSB Debit Card was declined first by contactless and then via pin.
My (new) Lloyds Debit card was also declined via pin. So wetherspoons starting getting suspicious about my cards. It was lucky that another person was also using a TSB card got declined.

I had to dig out the credit card and pay with that.

Phoned up TSB and was promptly cut off while on hold at exactly 45m:00s. Phoned up afterwards and a message was played about a "technical issue".

Lodged a complaint about it when I got home and was offered £13 for the phone call and £10 to "pay for another round of drinks on TSB". Needless to say that got refused and escalated.

Tuesday got a call from some escalated complaints team saying that they were putting £53 into my account as an apology for "the embarrassment I obviously had incurred and a refund of telephone costs".

That £53 has paid off a bit of the overdraft I had with them.

aldredd

sandco wrote: »

Lodged a complaint about it when I got home and was offered £13 for the phone call and £10 to "pay for another round of drinks on TSB".

£10 for 1 minute of inconvenience sounds more than reasonable to me

sandco wrote: »

Needless to say that got refused and escalated.

Now you're just being greedy (imo, of course)

sandco

Try 5 mins to pay. Plus the 45min and 20min follow up phone calls.

All in all, I haven't physically had the cash as it paid off a little OD I had with them.

dotdash79

Archi_Bald wrote: »

A 3-hour outage for a mission critical banking system is about 2 hours and 55 minutes too much, and it doesn't cost vast amounts of money to achieve "seven nines", or even just "two nines" availability.

You wouldn't expect an aeroplane to fail for a few hours on the way from London to Tokyo. Or a life support unit in an intensive care unit. Both are of course more important than an ATM network since there is an immediate danger to life, but both are examples of affordable "seven nines" availability.

Thus the excuse that it it would be too expensive for a bank to provide the highest availability is exactly that - an excuse.

I'm sure a few weeks ago someone was on here comparing air plane availability with bank system which wasn't 24/7. People don't want banks to go off line to do essential maintenance / upgrades, yet aren't happy when outages happen.

Planes and, life support machines have periods when they are not used to be maintained and quite a lot of plans have failed in the air.

Herbalus

sandco wrote: »

All in all, I haven't physically had the cash as it paid off a little OD I had with them.

Yes you have. It reduced your overdraft. That's the exact same thing as you putting 53 pound coins into your account.