Dear Westpac – “Internet Banking is currently unavailable” should NOT be in your vocabulary. WTF are you doing???
Note to Westpac
by cameron | Sep 3, 2007 | Uncategorized | 8 comments
8 Comments
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That’s what happens when you deal with a crappy bank 🙂
Hope you had a happy father’s day………
I hope this was at 3:30 in the morning?
It shouldn’t matter what time of day it was. The idea of outsourcing all the teller work to us the customer means a trade off – the trade being that we get to do it in the middle of the night or whenever we so wish.
Occasional (explained) outages are unavoidable. Perhaps a slightly better message such like – “our eta for being able to process your request is X minutes”. Don’t tell me they don’t have service level agreements in place.
That’s ok… I went to my local bank on Sunday and out of all the ABMs they have, 0 were working. If you have multiple ABMs, then why would you be stupid enough to take ALL of them offline at the same time? Idiots.
Move to ANZ, that’s what I’m doing.
angus
It does matter. There is a thing called scheduled down time. The middle of the night is when you do it.
You don’t expect your car to operate for years on end without a day in the garage from time to time. Its the unscheduled stuff that is the issue.
Remember that the more nines you want, the more it costs. Four 9s (99.99% up time) is a lot cheaper than six 9s (99.9999% up time).
Database performance degrades over time. They need to be reorged from time to time.
Gnoll, when you do “scheduled down time”, it is normal procedure to a) do it in the middle of the night as you say and b) to put up a little page which says ‘sorry, we’re doing scheduled maintenance and will be back soon”. Westpac did neither of these. They just went offline. BTW, as of right now (5 September, 2007 9.51am AEST) their main site is still offline, although I noted late last night they did get their online banking site back up.
Hi Cam
The first post was just to ask what the time was.
The second post was to outline why having down time not completely unavoidable.
Your right, you tell people about “scheduled down time” before hand. The longer the down time, the longer notice you give people.
Notice how lots of big outfit shut down b/w Christmas and New Year. Others start planning long weekends, months on advance.
Given we haven’t heard more in the news, I’m starting thinking their core systems have not been effected. ATMs not giving out ‘real’ money and huge queue in bank branches would even get old media’s attention.