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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, Touché) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday February 08 2019, @02:59PM (5 children)
After all, it's Backed Up and Redundant!
All I'm waiting for is to learn if they were outsourced because I'd love to put this in both my "Why You Don't Outsource" file as well as "Why You Don't Cloud" file.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Funny) by DannyB on Friday February 08 2019, @03:14PM (2 children)
Outsource your cloud infrastructure into another cloud. Taken to its logical conclusion, there can be unlimited clouds and no hardware at all! Managers: think of the cost savings!
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Friday February 08 2019, @05:30PM
Many people are saying the future of finance is Quantum Fog & Cloud A.I, Block Chain & 6G I.O.T. Smart!!
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday February 09 2019, @01:28AM
> Outsource your cloud infrastructure into another cloud. Taken to its logical conclusion, there can be unlimited clouds and no hardware at all!
https://xkcd.com/908/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Friday February 08 2019, @11:12PM (1 child)
You jest, but they wouldn't have had this particular problem if they were using the cloud.
The cloud is someone else's server, yes, but if you're using a big provider like AWS et all, it's someone else's global, redundant, professionally managed datacenter network. A single datacenter or two going down (N+2 redundancy) would just be a blip in the fleet-wise performance graphs.
Meanwhile, a company not specializing in cloud services probably doesn't maintain a global, redundant datacenter network.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Friday February 08 2019, @11:58PM
Maybe. And I'm willing to accept that if true, if it was an internally managed datacenter at fault so be it.
OTOH, hell yes they could have had this problem with a cloud installation. From what I read in TFA this may have been an incorrect configuration taking the whole system out. That can happen in the cloud just as easily as it can in a managed datacenter, if not moreso. Not to mention financial networks needing far better failover than just redundancies making everything just a little more complex. And that troubleshooting might actually require knowing *which* box is malfunctioning.
If there's anyplace that will go for reduction of costs by using cloud services you can bet it will be a bank. If it is allowed to.
This sig for rent.