Single point of failure
why not just turn over to the backup routes while fixing the problem :-)
Anyone hoping to access their Post Office bank accounts today is out of luck – a computer failure has blocked access at all 11,820 branches. Pin devices on counters are out of action, along with any other transactions using card accounts. A spokesman for the Post Office said: The Post Office today apologised to its customers …
PO counters/banking and the Royal Mail are part of the same group so they are most likely to have a unified IT procurement. Doh
Yes the Greek crisis was caused by Wintards using their PC for on-line banking as the Romanians and Nigerians emptied their accounts using one of the millions of banking trojans out there.
Not the first time the Greeks have be stitched up using a trojan horse, you would have thought that they would have learnt by now.
I think you'll find the greeks were doing the stitching against the trojans ...
As for windows though - it's funny - Greece did sign up to a blanket microsoft agreement during the last government... Fail in my book as the IT universities are quite strong and have a very strong presence in open source they should be able to maintain and support full OSS setups but this is the least of their worries now... anyway looks like US is next with all their debt ceiling talks etc.. hehe..
Surprised I haven't seen any mention anywhere of the bank of ireland link. Is it just the post office bit of the system that's down or the BOI bit ?
The paranoid bit of me wonders about the post office system going down around the same time that RBS appears to have loaned the BOI 2.9 billion euros according to the Irish Independent
Well, yes - it has changed. Parcel business is shared with several competitors and the letters business has been in decline for many years, with the increasing use of email and other forms of communication. The Post Office is as much a bank as it is a post office.
Thank god the senior management forgot to ask me to fill in a Non Disclosure Form, not that I'm saying they were incompetent for that, otherwise I wouldn't be able to complement them so much.
** Joking aside, I thought all the devs/testers etc were diamonds, and there were a few middle management, perhaps between 21 and 23 that were good, but there were some more senior guys whom I thought useless. But what do I know? They made absolute fortunes, some of them, so they must have been talented.
Is this another "common language" issue - as in, "two nations separated by a common language"?
In the US, the Post Office (note: definite article) is the place one goes to mail a letter - an institution of the United States Federal Government. I would shudder to have a bank account with them!
Reading other comments herein would lead me to believe what the UK calls "the Post Office" is distinct from the entity responsible for moving mail around - am I correct?
Back when my Dad was a Head Postmaster in the 1950s, there was a government organisation called "The General Post Office". It was a blanket organisation for
* Royal Mail (who delivered Letters and Parcels)
* Post Office Telephones (landline phone provider
* The marine radio stations (Portishead, North Foreland etc.)
* Martlesham research station
* The railway telephone branch (not the same as Beritish Railway signalling division)
* Post Office Telegram services
* National Savings
* Post Office savings bank (both deposit schemes, not money transfer systems)
* Post offices were the retail outlet for mail, for the payment of social benefits like child benefit & the old age pension and the handling of driving licences and car taxes. You could pay your income tax there and buy national insurance "stamps".
Later the government invented the Giro bank, a publically owned clearing bank which used post office counters for public access.
Nowadays we have
* Post Office counters Ltd - the retail operation, including foreign currency, the two saving schemes, and a sort of bank. They still do car tax and driving licences, and pay pensions to people with magnetic cards and no bank account.
* Royal Mail, who deliver letters
* Royal Mail parcels, who deliver broken things in crushed boxes
and that's about it. All the other stuff has been sold off, and they want to sell off those 3 too.
You wrote: " * Royal Mail, who deliver letters" but didn't qualify this statement!
Also, back in your esteemed parent's day, there was a cabinet minister responsible for running the GPO - the Postmaster General. One remembers with affection Dr Hill.
Yes, I've still got my ration book in the pocket.
> wrote: " * Royal Mail, who deliver letters" but didn't qualify this
You mean
* Royal Mail, who deliver letters sometime the following month. Occsionally. To a nearby address. Unless it's raining, when you never hear from them at all. Oh look, a christmas card from 1997.
will that do?
What about the thousands of benefit claimants who have just been transferred, many against their wishes, to two weekly benefits allocation whose children have been hungry for the past week/
The disappointed mothers will have returned home today without money or food for the children.
What about the men who went to collect their two weeks dole and now their bartender wont give them credit?