Santander upgrade gone wrong?

RG2015

EssexExile said:

Just think, in the good old days before instant everything no one would have noticed.

Noticed what? We got paid and made day to day purchases with rectangular pieces of paper and small metal discs.

IvanOpinion

eskbanker said:

molerat said:

Opening some branches tomorrow.  Is this going to be of TSB proportions ?

Use of "12pm" will get the pedants going, are they planning to stay open until midnight?

My digital watch uses 12AM to denote midnight and 12PM to denote midday.  Don't think there is any real agreement across the globe which is which though.  Since 12:00:01PM is 1 second after midday and 11:59:59AM is 1 second before midday I propose that we call it 12:00AM 12:00PM 12:00M 'noon' or better still just use the 24 hour clock and call it 12:00.

mr_accountant

Right shall I be the first, I don't need to use santander today nor have I been inconvenienced but which social media platform can I put my boring story so that the world knows and so help me claim my compensation because its my birth right? 

colsten

mr_accountant said:

Right shall I be the first, I don't need to use santander today nor have I been inconvenienced but which social media platform can I put my boring story so that the world knows and so help me claim my compensation because its my birth right? 

You should not assume that your requirements are the same for the other 14 million Santander customers. There have been plenty of completely credible reports from people stranded at petrol stations, unable to buy food or pay for their train/underground ticket or their taxi etc etc. Those people have a right to compensation, and they will no doubt keep the Santander complaints team busy for some time.

Instead of bragging with an I‘m alright Jack attitude, it would be constructive to remind people of the importance of always having alternative payment means. This can be anything from carrying cash to having one or more other current accounts with a positive balance  to one or more credit cards. Goes (almost) without saying that one should have at least one each of a VISA and a Mastercard, in case one of them has a problem (as has happened in the past).

As aside, having my main current account with Santander: I won‘t be making any compensation claim myself as I was not materially inconvenienced by this outage. I will also not close my Santander account. 

briskbeats

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

greyteam1959 said:

Same here............
Always like to have an alternative bank account & credit / debit card.

^^ This is why it’s important to have a backup.

Hate when a bank is having problems as customers blame US for it! 

Who is us?

Me and my colleagues 

So are you Santander IT?

No - shop worker. Had customers shouted at us when Lloyds’ systems went down and another bank went down earlier this year. They blamed us even though the problem was with the bank NOT us

surreysaver

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

greyteam1959 said:

Same here............
Always like to have an alternative bank account & credit / debit card.

^^ This is why it’s important to have a backup.

Hate when a bank is having problems as customers blame US for it! 

Who is us?

Me and my colleagues 

So are you Santander IT?

No - shop worker. Had customers shouted at us when Lloyds’ systems went down and another bank went down earlier this year. They blamed us even though the problem was with the bank NOT us

As a shop, you should have a system in place to work around the situation. How did shops function with credit cards before everything was online?

IvanOpinion

tempus_fugit said:

This sort of thing happening so often suggests that they didn't have a proper backout plan or it hadn't been properly tested. Unfortunately these things happen, but they should always be able to put everything back if necessary, it shouldn't all be down for this long.

That depends on the nature of what has gone wrong. Several years back we hit a problem which meant it took us almost 80 hours to get a stable system back online.  The press and social media was rife with BS about software updates, incompetence etc. etc. and 101 "experts" providing simple solutions and pointing the finger of blame - but not one was even close to guessing what had actually happened.

The problem was a set of unpredictable conditions.  For commercial reasons I can't go into great detail but  ... despite all the sensors, our primary site had suffered undetected damage that brought the servers down over a period of about 1-2 weeks (as best as we can guess).  This meant they were still syncing with our DR site (several hundred miles away) using an industry standard best practice process that had been tested many times in the past, but (unknown to us) the data contained corruptions.  In fact we had only audited and tested our fail over process 6 weeks previously and it worked perfectly.  When the primary site went down it went down big time in a way that did not trigger DR to kick in.  We spent the first few hours not realising the problem and trying to get the primary site up and running, eventually we sent someone to the primary site itself (120mile round trip) and realised the scale of the problem (there was no way it would be recoverable or brought back up for many weeks). 

We then manually fired up the DR site and it was online within the hour - but reports started flooding in of data problems so we had to take it back down.  Realising the problem we restored from a backup (a process that takes several hours - and took us 3 goes before we found a stable data set) but the regulator would not allow us to bring the site back up until we had done a load of additional actions and checks.  The board did what boards do best, ranted, raved and demanded hourly updates (which meant we were basically a man down just to provide them with their updates).  Our entire team did not leave the office for those 80 hours with us often seen sleeping in our chairs or under desks as we waited for various processes to complete.  On the plus side it made us all valuable resources in the market and targets for head hunters.

masonic

eskbanker said:

tempus_fugit said:

eskbanker said:

molerat said:

Opening some branches tomorrow.  Is this going to be of TSB proportions ?

Use of "12pm" will get the pedants going, are they planning to stay open until midnight?

That's 12am.

It's never going to be a particularly productive discussion, but with your Latin username you'll doubtless be aware that 'pm' is post meridiem, i.e. after noon - obviously 'am' is correspondingly before noon, so using either am or pm for midday itself (or midnight) is best avoided....

"Midnight" was deprecated in ISO 8601-1:2019. Causes even more arguments, as many fervently believe midnight can only occur at the end of a day (24:00), whereas the convention is for midnight to correspond to 0:00 at the start of the day. So midnight on Sunday would precede 10am on Sunday. Seems like as good an excuse as any to clock off a minute or two early

RG2015

surreysaver said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

greyteam1959 said:

Same here............
Always like to have an alternative bank account & credit / debit card.

^^ This is why it’s important to have a backup.

Hate when a bank is having problems as customers blame US for it! 

Who is us?

Me and my colleagues 

So are you Santander IT?

No - shop worker. Had customers shouted at us when Lloyds’ systems went down and another bank went down earlier this year. They blamed us even though the problem was with the bank NOT us

As a shop, you should have a system in place to work around the situation. How did shops function with credit cards before everything was online?

Before credit card data was online, there was a machine that ran a roller or press over the embossed card to take an imprint of the details. These are of course long gone. The shop would have a backup system, either cash or cheques. It is not the fault of the shop. The bank is clearly to blame for providing systems that are not robust.

The bank should have a backup and most prudent customers would also have a backup but I cannot see what other backup a shop could have.

IanManc

RG2015 said:

surreysaver said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

colsten said:

briskbeats said:

greyteam1959 said:

Same here............
Always like to have an alternative bank account & credit / debit card.

^^ This is why it’s important to have a backup.

Hate when a bank is having problems as customers blame US for it! 

Who is us?

Me and my colleagues 

So are you Santander IT?

No - shop worker. Had customers shouted at us when Lloyds’ systems went down and another bank went down earlier this year. They blamed us even though the problem was with the bank NOT us

As a shop, you should have a system in place to work around the situation. How did shops function with credit cards before everything was online?

Before credit card data was online, there was a machine that ran a roller or press over the embossed card to take an imprint of the details. These are of course long gone. The shop would have a backup system, either cash or cheques. It is not the fault of the shop. The bank is clearly to blame for providing systems that are not robust.

The bank should have a backup and most prudent customers would also have a backup but I cannot see what other backup a shop could have.

I agree with you. And of course more and more cards these days aren't embossed and are flat, so the old manual machines wouldn't work with them even if a shop still had them.