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The Register reports that Wells Fargo Bank experienced an issue in a data center Thursday morning, and things have not been the same since:
Wells Fargo customers have been unable to access their online bank accounts for more than seven hours today – after smoke knackered one of its data centers.
Starting around 6am Pacific Time (2pm UTC), the American bank's online portal and its mobile application have been totally unusable. There are also reports of cards being rejected by cash machines and stores.
"We're experiencing system issues due to a power shutdown at one of our facilities, initiated after smoke was detected following routine maintenance," the bank said in a statement. "We're working to restore services as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience."
[...] According to fire chief Tim Boehlke, of Lake Johanna Fire Department, the downtime kicked off at a Wells Fargo data center in Shoreview, Minnesota. We're told a fire suppression system was activated at around 0500 local time (1100 UTC), forcing a power shutdown, and switching off the facilities' servers. When the fire department got there, though, they found no evidence of a blaze.
Fire suppression systems tend to be rather punishing to data center machines, particularly their hard drives, as sysadmins in this Reddit thread on the outage point out. It could take a while to restore power and undo the effects of the suppression system.
[...] Whether the backups failed, or the shutdown caused a cascading fault that affected other data centers and took out the rest of the bank's online presence, isn't known at this time. It is baffling that a single incident has set off such a chain reaction that it knocked out the entire internet-facing infrastructure of the bank.
Also at SF Gate.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Friday February 08 2019, @12:40PM (7 children)
Baffling? Not at all.
It's called a "lean, mean, efficient capitalistic machine", where the most common free association between "redundancy" and "engineering" is no longer reliability engineering [wikipedia.org] but the surge of the share prices whenever a company sacks some of its engineers.
For those that have the perverse pleasure of displaying engineering traits (not the El Reg journos, seemingly), see cascading failure [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 08 2019, @02:48PM (5 children)
All too predictable and reliable result of Wall Street valuation methods that look more closely at present operating costs than consistency and reliability.
I wonder, if CEO pay extended into the future - say 10 years after the CEO steps down, based on performance metrics, how differently would they behave? Not extra pay, but instead of pay today for last quarter's performance, get 10% of their compensation in the year worked, and an additional 10% every year after based on metrics.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday February 08 2019, @03:12PM
Many years ago there was a Dilbert about surging share prices as a result of firing engineers. The PHB said they could fire another batch of you every time they needed a boost in the share price. "It's like printing money!" he exclaimed.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @06:19PM (3 children)
The CEO will never agree to that. Money now cost more than money later.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday February 08 2019, @09:04PM (2 children)
They will if it's a condition of hiring.
If I were playing the CEO game, I'd love to have 10 years of residual income after I resigned my duties.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 09 2019, @01:25AM (1 child)
If they don't like it, keep asking and you'll soon find a very competent person who will.
And you probably will get better results from that kind of person.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 09 2019, @03:11AM
I'd like to think so, but so often the CEO selection game is more about contacts than it is about competence. Both are important to success.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @04:13PM
Or, the smoke was a distraction from the agent planting malware in the system.