The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

Lloyds sorry for phone problems

Chris Bulow

Sunday? 

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 17:13 GMT

Of course their branches weren't affected - they'd have been closed....

Anonymous Coward

Either they had two problems or they're being economical with the actualité 

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 17:13 GMT

Thumb Down

Tried withdrawing money from an ATM yesterday afternoon and while it would display my balance and confirm I had funds, it wouldn't let me take out any and claimed my card issuer had refused the transaction. When I phoned them I was played a recording talking about computer problems and then put straight through to an operator who confirmed there was a problem with their systems,

So a spokeswoman talking about "branches and internet banking" may be a narrowly correct comment, but the ATM network would seem to fall between the cracks...

Anonymous Coward

bank charge 

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 19:03 GMT

they probably charged every customer £35 for every failed phone call they tried to make to them.

Jacqui

Hmm L-TSb having problems? 

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 19:03 GMT

I wonder why there are not already queues at branches withdrawing life savings?.

Oh I forgot - the UK gets an inch of snow all everything stops - including the banks!

How can they blame IT for the computer problems as IT seems to run from india?

Oh I forgot - the indian outsource-gate panic has only just started :-)

Lionel Baden

lol 

Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 23:04 GMT

i found out the hard way !

called was answered by a person ....

Immediatley knew something was wrong

skelband

Move along...nothing to see here 

Posted Tuesday 3rd February 2009 02:17 GMT

Stop

Is this story really newsworthy?

Must have been a slow day......

Anonymous Coward

more likely to be BT 

Posted Tuesday 3rd February 2009 02:17 GMT

as someone who works in a bank's IT department, incidentally not lloyds TSB, internal software tends to be remarkably resilient. The majority of outages are due to BT line failures or hardware failures where the redundancy doesn't kick in for some reason. The majority of failures we get are external communications lines going down, where we have to deal with a third party to get the service back up and running again, rather than fixing it ourselves.

The only exception* to this are releases, ie updated software, if, somehow, it goes horrifically wrong after all the pre-release tests, it might take out a system for an hour or so on a Sunday morning**, but more than that and the update will be pulled and rolled back.

*obviously i'm excluding web based systems from this, as web developers are so universally shoddy their stuff goes wrong all the time!

**only a few branches are open, so not a massive problem