Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
To prevent another run on UK banks.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is not a mundane detail, Michael!
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
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......
A later commenter did: http://www.computerweekly.com/news/1280093677/Royal-Bank-of-Scotland-cuts-1000-IT-jobs
The summary says there's no fix date available, and I know that's what it says in the Register article, but the second article, linking to the bank's site, has this to say:
The bank says the issue has now been fixed but it will take the weekend to clear the backlog which amounts to millions of euro in transactions.
It would appear that an update to CA-7 resulted in the actual schedule for these being corrupted or deleted. Therefore they do not know how much any customer actually has in their account, since accounts were not updated with transactions from the previous day.
The problem now appears to be fixed (read: update backed out and control datasets restored), but they still have to run through three days of unprocessed transactions, so people are not getting money paid in during these three days into their accounts as expected, resulting in misery.
This is something which should have been detected and fixed in a competent mainframe site very quickly indeed, so I imagine that the wisdom of outsourcing any "back-office" function of this nature is shortly going to be a matter of very close scrutiny.
Hope this helps.
Well, I don't know if it's still the case, but when I worked in banking IT in the late 80s here in the US there was a standing rule: if you don't process checks for more than 24 hours, you can be taken over by the Federal Reserve--where that takeover implies the possibility of being shut down and your assets distributed to other banks.
That really kept the fear of god in management with regard to keeping core IT running, backups, disaster recovery, etc. Daily offsite backups, periodically loading the backups at a backup facility and running test loads...
There should still be such a rule, and it should apply to electronic transactions as well as checks (not much difference anymore anyway), and the UK ought to adopt it. If a bank takes down its main system with a fucked-up patch, and can't get its disaster recovery plan working in 24 hours, shut it down.