What on Earth is Happening at smile Bank?

silverwhistle

Just found out myself although luckily all I wanted to do was to check my balance. I got out some cash this morning with no issue. Not very confidence inducing the lack of information.

zhatorna65

Smile have been going downhill ever since the co-op mismanagement fiasco a few years back... the website is really badly designed now and they've not been investing in improving it at all.

Plus the very poor PR around this outage is destroying any remaining confidence I may have had in them... I'm sure I'm not the only one. Is it really so difficult to tell people what's going on?  And why does an online-only bank not have a more fault-tolerant infrastructure?

I've been with them for about 20 years, but this is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back I think... time to switch.

Marylynn1949

I have emailed the Chief Executive, and guess what, he is on annual leave until 27 July!

zhatorna65

They're now posting updates on the co-op bank website:

https://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/news/2020/smile-service-information

DairyQueen

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

voyager_one_saturn

I've always liked Smile but with Co Op's online bank it seems a bit spare.

"Following a number of days of slow performance, we made the difficult decision to take the smile digital service down to investigate this issue further and work on resolving the access for customers."

This sounds like a coordinated DDOS attack on the web site but if so, I don't see why they couldn't block the offending IP addresses.

I'm wondering if this is even more serious than that.

RetSol

https://www.which.co.uk/news/2020/07/smile-digital-banking-outage-what-are-your-rights/

[Deleted User]

juice777 said:

3 days ago I couldn't log into my other two banks tand I still can't login to the smile account I think this country might have been victim of a cyber attack from China over retaliation to Hong Kong citizens being offered to citizenship for the UK and 5G they did it to Australia last month and that's why there's been a press blackout.

I think the problem is closer to Manchester than Beijing.

eskbanker

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

Not sure what the value or relevance is of unsupported speculation about a hypothetical scenario involving an entirely different small bank?

DairyQueen

I accessed online banking successfully at 07:15 today. Sincerely hope that the problem has now been fixed.