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[...] With customers locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB[*] computer crisis has been one of the worst in recent memory. The bank, its chief executive, Paul Pester, admitted on Thursday, was “on its knees” and it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.
[...] By March 2017, the nightmare for customers that was going to unfold a year later appeared inevitable. “It was unbelievable – hardly even a prototype or proof of concept, yet it was supposed to be fully tested and working by May before the integration work started,” the insider continued. “Senior staff were furious about the state it was in. Even logging in was problematic.”
[...] However, only hours after the switch was flicked, systems crumpled and up to 1.9m TSB customers who use internet and mobile banking were locked out. “I could have put money on the rollout being the disaster it has been, with evidence of major code changes on the hoof over last weekend and into this week,” the insider said.
[...] Customers reported receiving texts saying their cards had been used abroad, that they had discovered thousands of pounds in their accounts they did not have – or that mortgage accounts had vanished, multiplied or changed currency. One bemused account holder showed his TSB banking app recording a direct debit paid to Sky Digital 81 years from now. Some saw details of other people’s accounts and holidaymakers complained that they had been left unable to pay restaurant and hotel bills.
TSB, to customers’ fury, at first insisted the problems were only intermittent. At 3.40am on Wednesday 25 April, Pester tweeted that the system was “up and running”, only to be forced to apologise the next day and admit it was actually only running at 50% capacity.
[*] [Update added for our non-UK community. --martyb] TSB Bank was originally founded as "Trustee Savings Bank plc" on November 27, 1985:
TSB Bank plc is a retail and commercial bank in the United Kingdom, which is a subsidiary of the Sabadell Group. TSB Bank operates a nationwide network of 550 branches across England, Scotland and Wales. TSB launched in its present form on 9 September 2013, with more than 4.6 million customers and over £20 billion of loans and customer deposits, and is headquartered in Edinburgh.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Monday April 30 2018, @02:47PM (1 child)
My corporate experience with large failing IT systems indicates the article is simplifying and warping the story into a unit event, but things that I've actually seen fail start so innocently perhaps with a single mere stuck server that intermittently need rebooting and end with large numbers of humans doing manual data entry as fast as they can and screwing it all up worse than in the old days when larger teams of experienced humans did everything by hand. Now some call center rando temp employee in India can only do their job because they essentially have "root" perms on the database server and idiot proofing merely meaning evolution produces better idiots, you end up with all these anecdotes about payments being recorded 81 years in the future and all that. The root cause was some transaction server requiring SSDs to get anticipated peak 10K trans/second instead got minimized in the budget to "save money" to an old 486 with PATA 5400 rpm spinning rust and 4 gigs of ram, and it crashes randomly over 100 trans/sec, and sure that was fixed in a marathon 48 hour emergency all hands on deck emergency troubleshooting session weeks ago, but for months or years people are going to be cleaning up "mortgage accounts vanished and multiplied" and stuff like that. Meanwhile, now that the old system has been broken apart for scrap a month ago and the new system was debugged two months ago and working flawlessly since then, senior mgmt finally gets the memo from PR about the bad legacy media stories circulating and orders a roll back from the operating new system to the old system that no longer physically exists anymore and the plan to roll to the new system took a year to roll out and they say its gotta roll back before open of business tomorrow ... And may God have mercy on their souls if they actually try rolling back resulting in twice as many blown out accounts and drawing out the PR firestorm into something twice as long. But, the contractors will get lots of money, and to quote the movie Idiocracy, "I like money" so I'm not seeing a huge problem here.
But whadda I know, I'm not a journalism major so I'm sure those frat bros at the guardian is more correcter than I are at ritin' clickb8.
(Score: 4, Funny) by kazzie on Monday April 30 2018, @03:59PM
A 486-era motherboard with 4 Gb of RAM? They probably spent all the "saved money" budget to buy it!