back to article Wheels fall off Aviva Insurance's website for 5 hours

Aviva's British insurance customers were left battling to get through to a jammed helpline after the company's IT services suffered a five-hour outage that left its web services dangling. A Reg reader wrote in to say his attempt to access his account online had been fruitless for two days. An Aviva spokesperson confirmed over …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Ivan Headache

    Argh!

    If I ever post a comment with the word 'outage' in it, plese send someone round to termina..........

    Drat. too late.

  2. jason 7

    Not quite

    I think you might find Aviva sold the two data centres in Norwich and moved all their kit out some time ago. The two centres have been fully refurbed and are now run by Sentry42 and very nice they are too.

    Sentry42 would be more than happy to have Aviva put their data back in should their current system not be up to scratch.

    1. Tim #3

      Are you sure about that? I thought Aviva built two new data centres in/near Norwich (one of which is utterly huge) which are run by EDS/HP for them, then moved out of their old twin data centres in Bowthorpe and sold that off to Sentry42 who have now refurbed that site. I would gladly be corrected though.

      I gather Rackspace had an outage yesterday too- wonder if there is any connection? Maybe some key hardware component had a failed firmware update or something.

      1. Chelios

        @ jason 7 - you are wrong.

        @ Tim #3 - you are right.

  3. KitD
    Thumb Down

    A blessing in disguise?

    It's a dreadful site to use. I have never been able to complete the simplest task without problems. And that's using one of the very small number of supported browsers.

    If it forces them to rethink the whole thing, it would be worth it.

    1. Richard 116

      True...

      ...it's as buggy as hell.

  4. Thomas 18
    Thumb Up

    Nice insurance company you've got there...

    shame if something were to... happen to it. Fortunately for a low insurance premium we can cover you and make sure that doesn't happen.

  5. tommy060289
    FAIL

    It was crap anyway!

    I was with aviva last year and its online was terrible. Would freqently bug out when doing changes to policy and when i logged in it would say system error - try again later, and then id click back and i would be magically logged in!

    They should take a look at swift covers if they want to learn how to do online, all changes are easy and it works nicely!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I still prefer to call it Norwich Union

    but that's just me.

  7. Stretch

    Aviva Headquarters...

    ...is St. Helens Tower (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Helen%27s_%28Building%29).

    And legacy system decommisioning has been the Aviva / NU IT departments main task for the last 20 years.

  8. Random Coolzip

    Interesting....

    Just interviewed a chap this morning whose CV listed Aviva, claimed he developed their presentation tier and web services. Wasn't too keen on him to start with, think I'll just bin that 14-page resume he sent...

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    A bloke down the pub, who heard it from a guy on the street, who may have read it online, said that the issue was actually with a well known networking provider with the initials W and C in their name who suffered a major outage across a large segment of Aviva's internal network.

    For clarity, Aviva UK (the old Norwich Union) is based in Norwich/York, and Aviva Group (the rest of Aviva) is based in London/Rest-of-the-World.

  10. Shaveface
    Terminator

    Coward - It's amazing how much trouble a broken network switch can cause.

  11. whackomako

    how odd, the rumour i heard was that a certain other Contractor negligently misconfigured a live server without approval and twas nothing to do with the network.. and there is major egg on face of said other contractor and said conrtactor is doo-doo deep in self-prostrating-slimey-lickyout-bum-crack apology mode..hahahah

This topic is closed for new posts.