Faulty Patch Freezes Millions of UK Bank Accounts

frisket writes with news from The Register about ongoing problems for some UK banks: "'RBS and Natwest have failed to register inbound payments for up to three days, customers have reported, leaving people unable to pay for bills, travel and even food. The banks — both owned by RBS Group — have confirmed that technical glitches have left bank accounts displaying the wrong balances and certain services unavailable. There is no fix date available.' Customers of NatWest subsidiary Ulster Bank in Ireland have also been left without banking services. RTE reports that 'the problem had arisen within the systems of parent bank RBOS when an incorrect patch was applied.'"

Comments

They outsourced their IT dept...

[Anonymous Coward]

... getting rid of all the expensive people with experience in the mainframe backend system...

Re:They outsourced their IT dept...

[cusco]

"Expensive" experienced people would know all the interdependencies among systems, for a start. The outsourced staff are quite likely to not know that System W has to be brought up before System Q, because System S needs to authenticate with W first before it can provide data to Q.

And how much money do you think they're saving with their outsourced people today?

it's obvious

[Hognoxious]

They're doing tests on locking down funds transfer & electronic payments systems. This is probably much harder than you'd think, because they're designed to, well, just work. A few weeks ago (5th June, to be precise) a similar thing happened in Belgium. Caused chaos on the railways.

If anyone thinks it isn't a rehearsal for when Greece drops out of the Euro then I've got a nice bridge for sale.

Re:it's obvious

[Pieroxy]

I honestly don't think you're right. I've worked in enough "brack & mortar" companies that have slowly over time transferred all of their operations and value to IT so that nobody in the company outside of IT clearly knows how the system is supposed to be working.

This would all be well and good if only the management - the very people that ordered the transfer - were aware of it. But no, they still see the value in all the little people doing nothing in their offices. After all, IT is a cost and doesn't bring money in ! Need to cut costs? Lay off those geeks. They serve no purpose.

And all of a sudden, you've lost the only people that keep the entire company afloat.

Because what these people need to realise is that the ONLY people needed in the company are the IT. You can layoff ALL OF THE REST OF THEM and the company will keep on running. Badly, not as efficient, maybe at 10% of its capacity. But the IT people can take over as a cashier, delivery boy, salesmen, etc. Those jobs are complex, if you want to be efficient at them. But anybody can do them badly.

Lay off ALL OF IT. You company dies right there. End of the story. Because nobody else in the company can understand the first thing about IT. They wouldn't even know how to log in the production servers.

They outsourcedtheir IT? Equivalent of selling off the company. They outsourced to some random dudes in some place they cannot even reach? They killed themselves.

Guess this was inevitable....

[trancemission]

When you remove a 1000 members of IT staff [many of which were probably your best] and replace them with 500 offshore workers combined with the need to support *legacy* systems, you are asking for trouble.

http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280093677/Royal-Bank-of-Scotland-cuts-1000-IT-jobs

Regardless of the technical problems, the root cause of this seems to be management......

Re:Guess this was inevitable....

[Hatta]

Regardless of the technical problems, the root cause of this seems to be management......

Management always gets the credit when things go well. They should always get the blame when things go wrong.

Re:food!

[networkBoy]

You know, typo's aside, this is tragic. Many people live paycheck to paycheck. I used to, up till fairly recently, and I'd still be hosed if this happened because my rainy day money is not in a bank fund.

I would be calling for people to be put against the wall for this.
-nB

Re:Annoyed customer

[Skaperen]

Even though you were not impacted, you should still move your money to another bank ASAP.

criminal

[Anonymous Coward]

so when are upper management going to jail for stealing people's money for several days? or is it ok to steal billions of pounds as long as they give it back in a few days?

Re:Annoyed customer

[petes_PoV]

The bank won't ever say what the problem is/was. The reasons are that they think their customers are stupid so wouldn't understand - but they also probably don't actually know, themselves. That is also the reason they wouldn't issue a time-to-fix estimate. Their only IT people are outsourced, cheap staff in a foreign country and it's not likely that they have enough understanding of the systems to do much more than try undoing the last thing that happened before it all went wrong.

Natwest are not alone, another british bank (Barclays) has often been reported as having Monday-morning outages, which sounds a lot like a weekend update that went wrong.

As it is, having a single account is like having a single credit-card, no spare car key or only one kidney. You can get by until something goes wrong, but in an ideal world you'd have at least one spare.

Re:food!

[networkBoy]

This is not people's poor choices causing them hardship, this is their bank fscking the system hard.
Like I said, even I, with a 12 month rainy day fund, would be in a world of hurt, because I would not be able to put the money into the account to pay bills with, even if I could get it out from where it was.

Someone living wholly beyond their means is one thing. A bank not posting deposits is entirely different. Different, and unforgivable.
-nB

Re:test labs

[cusco]

Ah, but they've outsource their IT staff to save money, so they probably got rid of the test lab for the same reason. Never underestimate the stupidity of a group of executives looking for a short-term cost saving.