[...] 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.
Related Stories
A city watchdog has launched a stinging attack on TSB chief Paul Pester for portraying "an optimistic view" of its catastrophic IT meltdown in April that prevented 1.9 million customers from using online bank services.
[...] "For example, TSB referred to 'the vast majority' of customers being able to access their online accounts, at a time when there was a successful first-time login rate of only 50 per cent on the web channel."
[...] TSB planned to shift off LBG's infrastructure after it was bought by Spanish bank Sabadell for £1.7bn in 2013. At the time, Sabadell estimated the system switch would save the bank some £160m a year.
[...] Following the incident, a number of customers fell victim to fraud via phishing calls, emails and texts sent by scammers purporting to be TSB and asking them to verify their bank details.
A TSB spokeswoman said: "We look forward to updating the committee on the work TSB has undertaken to resolve problems for customers since our last appearance.
"We recognise that we have more to do to restore the bank's operations to the level that customers expect and are completely focused on that and ensuring customers are not left out of pocket."
related: Warning Signs for TSB's IT Meltdown were Clear a Year Ago
UK TSB Bank Business Customers Reportedly Unable to Access Accounts Online:
Totally Shocked Businesses have faced a morning without access to their online accounts following yet another IT meltdown at embattled TSB.
It follows a terrible 2018 for the bank that started in April with a week-long outage after a failed migration off its former parent firm’s infrastructure, and also included a series of smaller PR and IT disasters that eventually led to the departure of foot-in-mouth CEO Paul Pester. The bank revealed last week that the chaos had cost it some £330m, and reported a full-year loss of £105.4m.
According to DownDetector, TSB has been experiencing problems this morning since earlier in the morning. Users reported being unable to access internet banking, being shown blank screens on a range of browsers.
[...] TSB sent [The Register] a statement regarding the latest woes. "For some customers, clearing their cache or using an alternative browser has rectified the situation. If anyone has any queries they should speak to their local branch or contact our Business Banking Centre, however, call volumes are higher than usual."
Related: Warning Signs for TSB's IT Meltdown were Clear a Year Ago
Watchdog Slams TSB Boss for Underplaying Extent of IT Meltdown
Go Pester Someone Else: TSB Ditches CEO Over Bank's IT Meltdown
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:57PM (20 children)
The lesson to the consumer is that one needs a backup bank in case the primary fails.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday April 30 2018, @02:55PM (7 children)
I rode two banks into the ground during the first (or more to come) housing busts, one that got bought by a mortgage broker who went poof, and a year later the replacement which was heavily invested in Phoenix real estate loans finally accumulated enough foreclosed worthless properties to disappear, and in both cases the banks opened the literal next day as a subsidiary of a new larger bank with new rapacious service charges. Leading to my local credit union for the last decade which seems stable?
Anyway my point is there are bank fates worse than mere bankruptcy, such as total IT systems failure. Historically failure mean balance sheet implosion but it didn't impact customers immediately if at all, but post merger mania it seems the only failure mode left permissible by regulators is collapse of IT infrastructure where the customers get badly mauled.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday April 30 2018, @04:04PM (6 children)
Is there an equivalent of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme [fscs.org.uk] (government indemnity for the first £85k of private individuals' savings if a bank collapses) where you live?
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 30 2018, @04:20PM (5 children)
Yes, we have a rough equivalent, called the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. https://www.fdic.gov/ [fdic.gov] https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/ [fdic.gov]
The site is somewhat funky - as that second link loaded, I read that accounts up to $250,000 are insured, but that text isn't visible when the page finished loading. Maybe I allow scripts . . . . Found the text in the header, lol. Anyway, $250,000 is the current limit for insurance. I seem to recall when it was only $50,000, but wont' swear to that. For most of my adult life it has been $100,000. Anyone interested in when the limits increased can try to find it for themselves.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @04:38PM (2 children)
yeah, and they don't have the money to cover shit either. so whatever.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 30 2018, @05:02PM
Ooohhhhh-kay. But, it's fiat money anyway, right? The money has no real value, no intrinsic value. It's ONLY value, is as a measurement of the people's faith in the government.
In the thread on the Kennedy assassination, we briefly touched on the possibility that Kennedy was killed because he was going to expose the Federal Reserve for the scam that it is. Today, pretty much all the people in the world are subject to the whims of a central bank.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday May 01 2018, @02:40PM
If enough banks failed to make FDIC implode, there wouldn't be enough economy or civilization remaining presumably as the cause, such that your guaranteed deposits would be worth anything.
Sorta like it makes sense in a city sprawling enough to survive a 10 kiloton nuke (which wouldn't be very hard, depending how you define "survive") to install a 10 kiloton-proof vault for the safe deposit boxes, but you're just wasting valuable engineering effort making a 10 MT-proof vault if the entire metro area wouldn't survive a 10 MT nuke.
Also there's colloquial "the bank failed and went poof heeellllloooo FDIC" vs weirder paperwork and legal details, in my specific example FDIC claims were never made, because the banking regulators performed a shotgun wedding over the weekend and magically my tiny about to implode bank because a microscopic division of super big mega national too big to fail bank you've probably heard of. In my entire corporate life I've never seen mergers quite like banks during the 2007 crisis, even the most boring small business mergers take more than a weekend. FDIC only applies to claims against dead banks and mine technically never died, although it woudn't have made it alive to Monday if it weren't for the weekend shotgun wedding. My understanding is during the 2007 crisis this is pretty much how the government rolled, it was unusual to do the whole FDIC thing, but fairly typical to wake up one Monday to discover your bank is now a tiny branch of too-big-to-fail megabank.
I suspect much like the DoD has interesting contingency plans locked up in safes to prep for weird situations, the FDIC and friends, as seen in the 2007 crisis, have ways to keep things mostly working even if it involves dusty contingency plans stored in safes to perform mergers that usually take a year or so of legal effort under normal conditions, in a couple hours on a Saturday morning, when its really necessary. Kinda makes you wonder how much of the BS thats done out there is really necessary. Probably not much of it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Monday April 30 2018, @04:43PM
It was temporarily raised from $100,000 straight to $250,000 [fdic.gov] by Congress and George W. Bush during the financial crisis, extended through 2013 in 2009 [fdic.gov], and then made permanent in 2010 [boston.com]:
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday April 30 2018, @08:21PM
It started at $2,500. [wikipedia.org] I would have sworn to remembering when it was $10,000, and in fact typed that up before looking it up. But I'm significantly younger than that, but I'm older than the $40,000 minimum.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday April 30 2018, @03:42PM (3 children)
Oh, man, I'd just love to have a "mirrored redundant banking" service: add a dollar to one account, have it "mirrored" by the second, instant double of wealth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 30 2018, @05:09PM (2 children)
It's just a pain to have to withdraw during a leap second hoping for a glitch that would desync the debit between the two accounts.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday April 30 2018, @05:23PM (1 child)
That is just plain lack imagination.
Why withdraw when you can borrow against your total "worth"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 30 2018, @05:59PM
That should be a realDonaldTrump post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @04:09PM (2 children)
If you have significant savings, that is not a bad idea anyway. At least in Europe the insurance in case of bankruptcy of the bank is 100 000 EUR per person per BANK.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 30 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
It's very much the same here - https://www.fdic.gov/deposit/ [fdic.gov] If you have more than $250,000 that you want to deposit into bank accounts, spread the money around among banks that qualify.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @12:49AM
It's possible to get more insurance from one bank (or credit union, with their similar scheme). The key is to name the accounts slightly differently, for example one might be your own name, that covers the first $250K. The next one is your name with a beneficiary in trust (if you die, that one goes to the beneficiary, independent of your will). Then you start on joint accounts with family. Any decent bank officer can explain this for you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @04:40PM (4 children)
no, the lesson is that we need decentralized, privacy-capable money not dependent on some slave master.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday April 30 2018, @05:11PM (3 children)
Have you tried Gold ?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Monday April 30 2018, @06:04PM (2 children)
Gold only works if you stockpile it at home, otherwise you're just trusting someone else to know and accept that it's yours. And then you've got to successfully hide it, and convert it into usable currency when you want to use it without revealing that your stockpile is at home making you a target.
The sole advantage of gold is that it doesn't take much space to store it. Well, also it's value has been consistently increasing during our lifetimes. (That wasn't true 100 or so years ago. And may not be true in the future.)
OTOH, Gold, because of it's popularity, is wildly overpriced. You'd probably do better to invest in durable commodities. (NOT commodity futures. I'm talking about things like copper, steel, etc.) The problem is they take a lot of space to store, so you're pretty much forced to trust someone else to store it for you.
It sort of depends on what kind of future you are investing for.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Monday April 30 2018, @09:21PM (1 child)
Apocalypse or recession..can I have a third choice?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 3, Funny) by realDonaldTrump on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:28AM
The American people chose me. To Make America Great Again!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by khallow on Monday April 30 2018, @01:59PM (7 children)
So no plan or preparation going in, and even the "senior staff" realized the scheme was a failure. Yet they still moved forward on it. What did they think was going to happen? That it would magically fix itself upon contact with the customer? That works, right?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Monday April 30 2018, @02:06PM
(Score: 5, Interesting) by zocalo on Monday April 30 2018, @02:08PM (1 child)
Too big to fail though, right?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
(Score: 2) by bootsy on Tuesday May 01 2018, @08:53AM
I can count on one hand the amount of people the UK regulators have successfully prosecuted in the finance sector. The bank will definitely get a big juicy fine but prosecuting senior executives will be unlikely. These trials take years and always seem to collapse.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @02:09PM
Maybe they thought the Market would take care of it?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @03:35PM (2 children)
Parent Company: Spanish
Affected Customers: British
Spanish customers affected: None
Result: Large case of no fucks given by parent company.
Brexit, the gift that keeps giving..
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday May 01 2018, @01:38AM
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Tuesday May 01 2018, @10:23AM
I thought it might be viewed as a good example of why the UK is better out of the EU - to discourage foreign ownership. I don't suppose a group of Spanish bankers would love the British public any more from within the EU than from outside it. Anyway, I don't believe nationalities have anything to do with this foul-up.
Oh shit, it's started to rain outside ... that's Brexit for you again, the gift that keeps giving..
(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!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @04:07PM
Are there any advanced warning signs for a TMB meltdown? We gotta give him some more help if there is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @09:34PM (6 children)
For explaining the rest of the world what TSB is. SN has now reached dizzying heights of journalistic quality many professional publications fail to achieve.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday April 30 2018, @09:53PM (5 children)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2, Troll) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 01 2018, @07:28AM (4 children)
So no one managed to find out what TSB is? Is it like "KFC", which according to urban legend, is no longer an acronym, but the full name of the chain, and this change was caused by the fact that they are no longer legally allowed to call what they sell there "chicken". So what is a "TSB"?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01 2018, @09:05AM
The Shite-y Bustard?
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday May 01 2018, @12:04PM (2 children)
Serves me right for trying to enter a comment using a mobile phone! Thanks, too, for the kind use of humor to call it to my attention.
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Tuesday May 01 2018, @08:25PM (1 child)
So only after I commented did I read the comment I was replying to, as is our wont here on SN, and then I see that the answer to my inquiry lay in an edit to the Fine Summary, which I probably, as is wont, etc., etc, did not read. So what have we (I) learned from this episode? When countering FA's with TLA's (Fine Articles with Three Letter Acronyms), do try to spell them out, on at least the first occurrence in the main body of text, if not in the FAT (
File Allocati. . .Fine Article Title), and do not expect Soylentils, or again at least aristarchus to look at the FSU (Fine Summary Update). EOF QED.(Score: 3, Funny) by martyb on Wednesday May 02 2018, @07:20PM
Well played, oh ancient one. Well played, indeed! Kindly accept a "+1 Funny" from me.
Oh, and I think you missed expanding an abbreviation/initialism in your reply. What is... "SN"? ;)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday April 30 2018, @11:03PM
Well according to TFA, TSB was leasing the cloned Lloyd's Banking Group IT systems from where it split from for the tune of 100 million pounds a year..
That is a shit load of money, so if the fallout of this is anything less than that per year, they've pretty much achieved their goals I would think...
long term reputation damage you say? Well nothing a few years of low key biding, a name change and some investment in marketing can't resolve - the low attention span sheeple are easily manipulated. Worse case is they merge or buyout another bank and put up a sign saying "New management" with a brand new name tag.