Faulty Patch Freezes Millions of UK Bank Accounts 155
frisket writes with news from The Register about ongoing problems for some UK banks: "'RBS and Natwest have failed to register inbound payments for up to three days, customers have reported, leaving people unable to pay for bills, travel and even food. The banks — both owned by RBS Group — have confirmed that technical glitches have left bank accounts displaying the wrong balances and certain services unavailable. There is no fix date available.' Customers of NatWest subsidiary Ulster Bank in Ireland have also been left without banking services. RTE reports that 'the problem had arisen within the systems of parent bank RBOS when an incorrect patch was applied.'"
Re:They outsourced their IT dept... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:They outsourced their IT dept... (Score:5, Informative)
I had the same question, and then saw this post [slashdot.org] further down, referencing this story [computerweekly.com] from 2010 (which in turn points to another story [computerweekly.com] discussing this as an ongoing strategy). Seems to have validity.
Fix has already been made (Score:5, Informative)
The summary says there's no fix date available, and I know that's what it says in the Register article, but the second article, linking to the bank's site, has this to say:
The bank says the issue has now been fixed but it will take the weekend to clear the backlog which amounts to millions of euro in transactions.
Problem and fix (Score:5, Informative)
It would appear that an update to CA-7 resulted in the actual schedule for these being corrupted or deleted. Therefore they do not know how much any customer actually has in their account, since accounts were not updated with transactions from the previous day.
The problem now appears to be fixed (read: update backed out and control datasets restored), but they still have to run through three days of unprocessed transactions, so people are not getting money paid in during these three days into their accounts as expected, resulting in misery.
This is something which should have been detected and fixed in a competent mainframe site very quickly indeed, so I imagine that the wisdom of outsourcing any "back-office" function of this nature is shortly going to be a matter of very close scrutiny.
Hope this helps.
Re:Solution: (Score:2, Informative)
STOP IT. Do not turn that in to a meme. You are rewarding them for spamming.