Barclays.net Bank Holiday outage leaves firms unable to process payments

Barclays.net has been shrugging off business customers' login attempts since Friday, leaving many unable to process payments over the bank holiday weekend. Problems with the business banking service peaked on Friday, with customers complaining that they were unable to process payments ahead of the bank holiday weekend. One …

[Lee D]

Nothing to do with them telling me that I must upgrade our machines to 8.1 or 10 for Business Internet Banking with smartcard authorisation to work as they have a new piece of software based on newer .Net frameworks than come with 7 or 8.0?

Seems a strange coincidence if not.

I guess we'll find out next month when salaries go out as we deliberately paid early this month to avoid that particular mess.

[hi_robb]

Erm

Dear Barclays,

To check if your service is up ping it...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

And there speaks someone who knows sod all about communications.

[caffeine addict]

Re: Erm

There speaks someone who doesn't know what Barclay's mobile payment app thingie is called...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

No I didn't however it's a lame excuse as the app is called Pingit and is for personal users, this was a business outage.

[hi_robb]

Re: Erm

It was supposed to be a joke!

:-(

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Erm

I appreciate that and it would have been funny if every body knew what Barclays applications were called. However as a joke it has a limited audience and even though I have an account with Barclays I trust their online applications about as far as I would be able to throw one of their portly directors, so for the greater good I'm not part of that clique.

[Captain DaFt]

Re: Erm

Chris W, you are Drax and I claim my 5 pounds*.

*(minus penalty charge of 1.72 pounds for using an outdated meme)

[John G Imrie]

small number.

Why do these status updates always talk of a small number of customers, small against what? Total number of customers or total number that tried to login?

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: small number.

They usually say "limited number of customers". This is much better, because so long as at least one customer succeeded in logging in, then they aren't technically lying. But limited number implies small number, without actually claiming that.

I bet they've got stats to show that only a small-ish percentage of customers log in every day though, so in this case they can say it didn't affect the ones who didn't try to log in, even if it would have if they'd wanted to.

It's not lying. It's marketing...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: small number.

It means as long as all those affected don't speak out and a true number is known of whatever measure they can claim it only affected a small or, if you wish, limited number of users.

[Adrian 4]

Re: small number.

Since they don't have an infinite number of customers (they'd run out of account codes), 'limited' is anything up to 'all'.

[Triggerfish]

Re: small number.

I imagine it's a Venn diagram, "one circle is people who use barclays", the other is "really really rich people" the small intersection are customers.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess this was caused by too many lines of code...

[Doctor Syntax]

"Total number of customers or total number that tried to login?"

The total number who talk to each other at one time.

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

Where is Rowan Atkinson when you need him?

[wolfetone]

Fwibbib.

[Anonymous Coward]

So, the computers wanted a holiday too?

ROTM.

[Tony S]

" ..and we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused"

And I would like to see a penalty applied to any bank that has this kind of a problem. Say a sliding scale of so much per set period of time. £10 per 24 hours, £25 for 48 hours etc.

But not to come out of bank profits, oh no. To come off the director's salary or bonus.

"When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates the mind most wonderfully"

Samuel Johnson

[Sheddyone]

Unless there's been a shareholder revolt, I doubt whether the bank's directors will miss £10 per day, tbh. Even I could manage that!

[Richard 12]

Per affected customer

That should concentrate the mind

[Anonymous Coward]

"Can I Haz Teh Codez? How Outsourcing Transformed the Banking Industry and How We All Benefited"

Is the title of a paper Gartner will, once again, not be writing soon.

[Doctor_Wibble]

Shtum or Schtum, not stumm...

Properly educated readers will recognise stumm gas from 2000AD.

That said, I may be wrong - if Barclays are expecting trouble and are indeed keeping stumm just in case anything kicks off.

Just pretend it's an H-wagon icon.

[Triggerfish]

Moratorium

I work with retail companies during bank holidays, Christmas run up etc. They have a moratorium on all works, upgrades being performed unless it's absolutely essential, like might prevent trading essential, even then it goes up a few levels for approval and you better have every i dotted and t crossed on your back out plan. In fact pretty sure if I even sent some techs to the stores they would be met with hostile resistance from the store managers (whose bonus is tied to the stores profit).

So why is Barclays doing a routine upgrade before a busy bank holiday weekend, did they need to?

[I ain't Spartacus]

They got me.

With my favourite error message too.

Having just chucked nearly £15k of VAT to our beloved masters at HMRC, I got the following error message:

"There has been an error. Your transaction may have failed. Please check over tollowing 4 hours, and try again if it hasn't appeared on your statement."

Now that's what I call reassuring! Volune 2...

You've got to love the non-specificity of it. Not a nice warning in there to say, your payment's probably gone, so don't worry and definitely don't pay again as we might process it then too. Or a system that if they can't be sure just pulls the payment out. But nope, give people vagueness! Because no-body will be too concerned about the whereabouts of a mere £15k. Why that's not even enough for the most derisory of bonuses! And anyway if we've double-paid it for you, those nice people at HMRC won't take 6 months to sort it out and get your money back to you. Not a problem at all.

And to think I filled out their customer survey last Monday, saying the site was OK - if their bloody web designers could only get over this fucking minimalism thing that's infected design of late. Because text entry boxes need not be of the palest blue available on a white background, without text labels so you can't find the fucking invisible things. Bet they won't be offering me a chance to re-do that today...

[wolfetone]

Is it just me

Or is this sort of incident happening more and more often?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Is it just me

Yes. It's caused by treating IT as a commodity and outsourcing it to the lowest bidder

[wolfetone]

Re: Is it just me

Not aliens then?

Poo.

[Anonymous Coward]

Barclays.net experienced a technical issue the eSigner software

“Earlier we experienced a technical issue affecting some payments during a routine update to our systems” ®

“A new Trojan virus is targeting users of Smart Cards by offering an update to the eSigner software”. ref

[seasider]

Re: Barclays.net experienced a technical issue the eSigner software

"A new Trojan virus is targeting users of Smart Cards by offering an update to the eSigner software”. - Actually that warning has been there for weeks - the bit about the failed routine upgrade is the new one.

As a previous poster said - what on earth were they doing changing something a day before the Bank Holiday, and not only that the last weekday before the end of the month - i.e. payday!

We finally managed to get our small suppliers payment run out on Friday after lots of wasted time and grief. I learnt years ago not to leave the Payroll until the last day, so that was uploaded some days ago.

I reckon the "a small number of customers have been having problems" readily translates as "anyone who tried to use our website". More Marketing bollocks - trouble is the more they do this the less credible their press releases become. If one day some bright spark at a UK bank decides to launch a decent product (unlikely I know) none of us will take a blind bit of notice.

But back to the salient point - what was going on in Barclays IT dept's brains to do an upgrade when they did? My only suggestions are - it isn't a Bank Holiday in Elbonia or whatever low wage hell-hole the website is outsourced to, or probably more likely they simply don't give a toss, and/or have a clue.

If only the competition had a better reputation - but by and large they don't.

[Alan 19]

Housing transactions crashed too

What about the knock-on effect on consumers? Barclays kept schtumm about that. Problems with Barclays started the Friday before the bank holiday and caused nightmare problems for friends who were moving house that day. Their house had just been emptied and was ready to move in to, so several truckloads of furniture duly rolled up at midday. Trouble was, the vendor’s payment had not arrived, so they weren’t given the keys nor allowed to unload.

Finally turns out (at 4 o’clock - still no money had arrived) that the problem as with Barclays Bank not being able to transfer the cash. Everyone in the chain had to get a solicitor’s undertaking to enable their respective moves to go through. The elderly vendor was deeply distraught as, in theory, she could have been rendered homeless for the duration. Meantime my friends move out on the strength of just a bit of paper worth six figures in cash. The whole episode was shambolic. Nothing works in this country any more. Well done to Barclays though for dodging a bullet and escaping the wrath of Sky News or the Daily Mail.

[paulf]

Re: Housing transactions crashed too

Considering house prices were at stake I'm very surprised to see this didn't attract the beady eye of the Daily Fail.

Perhaps Barclays Bank is to Viscount Rothermere as HSBC is to the Barclay Brothers over at the Tory-graph.

[Chris Evans]

Apology fail!

"and we would like to apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

should be

"and we would like to apologise for THE inconvenience caused.”

'Any' plays the problem down. It is best not look like you're wheedling out of it.