AWS down

scoobyjones1

all fine now. They switched it off and on again.

NormalNorman

So I couldn’t bank in the UK because of an American book shop, lol!

Bendo

NormalNorman said:

So I couldn’t bank in the UK because of an American book shop, lol!

You couldn't bank in the UK because your bank inexplicably is dependent on something in an American region of one of the worlds biggest hosting providers.

What a UK bank is doing that relies on AWS US-EAST-1 is beyond me, and slightly concerning.  Lloyds need to explain what they are doing and what data (if any) they are storing outside the EU. 

wmb194

Bendo said:

NormalNorman said:

So I couldn’t bank in the UK because of an American book shop, lol!

You couldn't bank in the UK because your bank inexplicably is dependent on something in an American region of one of the worlds biggest hosting providers.

What a UK bank is doing that relies on AWS US-EAST-1 is beyond me, and slightly concerning.  Lloyds need to explain what they are doing and what data (if any) they are storing outside the EU. 

Yes, it's quite illuminating. For resilience the general advice is to have at least two current accounts with separate banking groups but do we now need to modify that to also include two separate banking groups using separate cloud service providers?

I'm not sure how we'd work that out but whilst Lloyds was down I noticed that Chase and NatWest/RBS were still working so I guess they're not using AWS, or at least not AWS US East...

ircE

wmb194 said:

Bendo said:

NormalNorman said:

So I couldn’t bank in the UK because of an American book shop, lol!

You couldn't bank in the UK because your bank inexplicably is dependent on something in an American region of one of the worlds biggest hosting providers.

What a UK bank is doing that relies on AWS US-EAST-1 is beyond me, and slightly concerning.  Lloyds need to explain what they are doing and what data (if any) they are storing outside the EU. 

Yes, it's quite illuminating. For resilience the general advice is to have at least two current accounts with separate banking groups but do we now need to modify that to also include two separate banking groups using separate cloud service providers?

I'm not sure how we'd work that out but whilst Lloyds was down I noticed that Chase and NatWest/RBS were still working so I guess they're not using AWS, or at least not AWS US East...

I have awarded you my first "Interesting", and not just because I had the same thought. I haven't been affected at all, thankfully, but it could be different next time. 

Ideally we'd have a list of banks / banking groups by underlying cloud service provider, so people can diversify. But is this information even available? And would we be able to keep track of changes? What if it turns out that cloud service provider is just one aspect of underlying technological architecture and there could be other things to consider as well? I'd love a deep dive into this.

RG2015

I have heard a rumour that there is a secret group that have agreed to exchange pieces of paper for goods and services.

Worse than that they are openly mocking good honest folk becoming paranoid about a complete breakdown of electronic services.

Eco_Miser

ircE said:

wmb194 said:

Bendo said:

NormalNorman said:

So I couldn’t bank in the UK because of an American book shop, lol!

You couldn't bank in the UK because your bank inexplicably is dependent on something in an American region of one of the worlds biggest hosting providers.

What a UK bank is doing that relies on AWS US-EAST-1 is beyond me, and slightly concerning.  Lloyds need to explain what they are doing and what data (if any) they are storing outside the EU. 

Yes, it's quite illuminating. For resilience the general advice is to have at least two current accounts with separate banking groups but do we now need to modify that to also include two separate banking groups using separate cloud service providers?

I'm not sure how we'd work that out but whilst Lloyds was down I noticed that Chase and NatWest/RBS were still working so I guess they're not using AWS, or at least not AWS US East...

I have awarded you my first "Interesting", and not just because I had the same thought. I haven't been affected at all, thankfully, but it could be different next time. 

Ideally we'd have a list of banks / banking groups by underlying cloud service provider, so people can diversify. But is this information even available? And would we be able to keep track of changes? What if it turns out that cloud service provider is just one aspect of underlying technological architecture and there could be other things to consider as well? I'd love a deep dive into this.

A long time ago, on a long gone computer I had a firewall program that could report, in real time, which programs were talking to which remote servers. It did this by doing a reverse DNS lookup on the IP address of the server.

In this way I discovered that Yorkshire Bank's servers were really AWS.

So anyone should be able to use a DNS lookup service to find the IP associated with their bank's url, then find the url associated with that IP address. 

Nasqueron

RG2015 said:

I have heard a rumour that there is a secret group that have agreed to exchange pieces of paper for goods and services.

Worse than that they are openly mocking good honest folk becoming paranoid about a complete breakdown of electronic services.

And how will shops process payments when said electronic services, which run the tills, barcode scanners etc are down? We're not in the old era of till staff knowing prices, when systems go down, having cash or card is irrelevant unless the shop wants to gamble on guessing prices or not ringing tills up

As an aside, this system down was affecting logging into banking apps etc, not making payments

ircE

Monevator covered this in this weekend's newsletter: https://monevator.com/bank-cloud-providers/