Bugger...
Not enough money in my pocket for a pint... and beer-o-clock is rapidly approaching :(
An outage in HSBC systems took down their online banking services and affected the functioning of their cards at both ATMs and points-of-sale on Friday, November 4. An HSBC UK spokesman told The Register that the bank had experienced problems since 2.45pm GMT, and that the problems were now hitting "definitely online banking …
It's an Oracle RAC cluster running under Veritas Cluster and vxfs/cfs cluster filesystem.
I was on a training course for VCS for RAC (on Solaris) with a HSBC guy, it's an 8 node RAC cluster running on T-Series Sun Servers.
Being as it's running under Veritas Cluster, not surprising...
Ok, first off VCS is a good product, as is the filesystem and foundation suite. It's rock solid and industry standard.
Secondly, having worked in RBS' IT for many years, I find it very hard to believe that something like this would be run on a piece of kit as small as an 8 node cluster. I find it pretty hard to believe that it's run off-mainframe.
No, jon 72, you don't. .... because haven't you realised that there are systems in place to stop you drawing out wealth in cash. Everyone who is rich is only so by the grace of electronic transfer of digits. They don't actually do any work for their wealth, they just know someone in the know and would presume to know how the system works and then can hold it to ransom.
Valuable CodeXSSXXXX for ZerodDay Trading Options and AIDerivatives on Mad Open Free Gray to Black and White Hatted Markets, Jim.
I just checked the HSBC opening page which has a news box on it.
Latest news (HSBC title)
My Accounts updates
Mobile View
Investments
Global Investment Perspective
Online security at HSBC
Payment Protection Insurance
Nothing reveals that they had an outage or what effects were caused.by the problem. Hardly good enough.
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
We're sorry our Digital, Mobile and Telephone Banking services are currently unavailable. We're working hard to get them back up and running as soon as possible.
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.
How about posting the *current* bank outage - natwest - https://www.nwolb.com
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
We're sorry our Digital, Mobile and Telephone Banking services are currently unavailable. We're working hard to get them back up and running as soon as possible.
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.
And, hot on the heels of HSBC's outage, along comes Natwest. Accessing http://www.nwolb.com at 1017 BST 5/11/2011 gives:
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
We're sorry our Digital, Mobile and Telephone Banking services are currently unavailable. We're working hard to get them back up and running as soon as possible.
We would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.
I ordered a Pizza from Dominos' website last night using my First Direct debit card about 9 p.m., unusually it bypassed Verified by Visa and I did wonder for a second or two whether the transaction had gone through successfully.
Fortunately, it appears it did as Dominos gave me an order number and my order turned up just before 10 as ordered.
As usual it was great.
A fairly common way of getting rid of pirates was hanging 'em at the high-water mark, and leaving their bodies to rot on the gallows. If and when the smell got to be a problem, tar was usually applied. That way all who passed by (especially other sailors) could have prolonged exposure to an Awful Example of why crime does not pay.
Apparently seagulls and crows thought that this kind of thing was an excellent idea. Think of it as a 17th-18th century seaside bird feeder.
As a recruiter I am seen as a naive fool, which means that HSBC card services decided to tell me that the reason for an awful screwup was that a whole batch of their cards had been compromised. Sadly for HSBC I also write for The Register and have written trading systems with my bare hands, so I contacted their media relations team about what was clearly a good story and they were caught in the trap of having to either admit they were lying to cover up their incompetence or that their security was crap, they chose to admit they were lying.
Of course they may have been lying about that, it is HSBC card services we are talking about here.
Few minutes ago...seems we are now affected in Canada as well... :
System message
Please be advised Internet Banking service is currently unavailable. Please try again. We regret any inconvenience this may cause and thank you for your patience. Please call 1-877-621-8811 (Personal Banking), 1-866-808-4722 (Business Banking) for assistance.