Tedious Service Bulletin: No prizes for guessing which UK bank's services are DOWN for business users Totally Shocked Businesses have faced a morning without access to their online accounts following yet another IT meltdown at embattled TSB. Money down the drain Terribly Sorry Bank reports 165% drop in profits to a pre-tax loss of £105.4m READ MORE It follows a terrible 2018 for the bank that started in April with a week- …
This is a clear job for IBM's much hyped AI. Not fixing the mess, because the evidence is that IT ineptitude is baked into the core of TSB and its parent (and AI has yet to solve anything useful), but making the excuses.
Get Watson primed and running, and as soon as the next TSB IT screwup occurs, Watson will instantly produce a compelling sounding, complicated excuse about what the problem is, how it isn't really TSB's fault, but they're working hard to fix it. Maybe Watson could even be promoted to fielding customer communications on Twitter and Zuckbook.
"the evidence is that IT ineptitude is baked into the core of TSB and its parent"
Why would IBM want to fix this? It's often a key skill required to remain an IBM customer...well that and deep pockets. Deep pockets that aren't empty.
Maybe Watson's next upgrade should be longer arms?
Too late for Facebook - Clegg has the job,
I did think of sending him a book by Daniel Pennac - in which the hero is appointed to the job of official scapegoat and gets shouted at and fired every time there's a foul up - but it occurred to me that he wouldn't have time to read it owing to having to spend so much time counting his money.
Too late for Facebook - Clegg has the job,
Well done, sir! There's a theme that could reunite our divided land. The universal hatred of Tw*t-in-chief Clegg, and his flexible integrity.
I know, I know: May, Clegg, Abbott, Smeagol Gove, etc etc. But even so, Clegg and his estwhile party, they're all worse vermin.
I'd send them a copy of The Mythical Man-Month ... OK, I know the issue is web development here, not a new OS but essentially the problem is the same ... putting a new system in to replace the old one that worked fine without really understanding how the old system worked.
> I logged into my personal account earlier. The login page froze so I looked in the console. SignalR was trying to connect to a hub on 127.0.0.1.
Take care you aren't accused of being a hacker. It's subversives like you with your knowledge of how to use a console and the basics of IP addressing that need to be watched you know.
Puzzled why anyone still banks with them... I used to, for both business and personal, and I don't do either now.
Multiple failures over a extended period.... Yes moving a business account can be a pain, especially if it's a larger business... But come on... It's the reason most organisations exist... The money!
So why do people still bank with them? Why aren't they bleading customers? Why aren't they on the edge of failure?
TSB are awful .... But anyone who still maintains an account with them despite plentiful alternatives... Pfffft, words fail me.
It adds a bit of spice to savings, that's the only reason I still have a current account with TSB: I loan them £1500 a month, they pay me 5% interest, and every so often there's the risk that I might not be able to access it easily for a few days...
I wonder whether if enough people complain this time, they might increase the interest rate to 7.5%?
(But, no, you probably shouldn't be using them as your main current account any more.)
The whole thing was set up to fail.
Lloyds were obliged to shed a bunch of customers because of government ownership. They could simply have offered incentives (paid for by the receiving banks) to customers to switch their accounts to existing providers. They could even have created a fintech-style business, drummed up support amongst their existing customer base and then sold that.
Instead, they offered a chunk of their current business "as is" along with outstanding loans and mortgages, setting up a clone of their current banking IT to host it and then offered it for sale on the basis that the buyer would then have to migrate all the IT to their own systems.
It was never going to work...
"But anyone who still maintains an account with them despite plentiful alternatives"
It was the behaviour of the former TSB that led to me abandoning Lloyds but as to the "plentiful alternates" they're only plentiful in terms of approximately matching awfulness. Awfulness includes all of them closing branches where I'd prefer to bank. Do actual branches matter? Yes, especially when you get online banking falling over and then telling customers to go to the local branch which doesn't exist for any acceptable value of local.
"but as to the "plentiful alternates" they're only plentiful in terms of approximately matching awfulness"
Very true. They are not the first bank I've had to abandon. But I don't think any of them have been quite as unreliable in terms of basic ability to do business - at least recently - they have a special talent here.
"Lloyds were obliged to shed a bunch of customers because of government ownership. They could simply have offered incentives (paid for by the receiving banks) to customers to switch their accounts to existing providers"
To be fair, they've kind of done that... but arguably no-one really cares.
But no, it was customers and branches that were required to be sold off in some way. There was no real easy way of doing it, as it was primarily meant to be set up as a challenger bank on its own merits (so required its own IT systems - carving out a segment of the overall Lloyds system was clearly the most risk-free way of doing that, as demonstrated by the other approach taken last summer!).
Really the problem was that there was 1 fewer banks on the high street, so they needed to reintroduce one. Ideally, it would have floated and existed on its own.
Honestly, if clearing cookies and cached data are necessary, you have a really rubbish website and server infrastructure.
That's why pages have a modified date / hash, which browsers and other caches query to see if it has changed even if they don't actually download the full file.
And cookies at worst should give you a stale session that sends you to a login page to create a new one.
That's really the "just turn it off and on again" rubbish answer that poor IT support give out when they have no idea but want to sound like it could be your fault.
Honestly, I have had thousand of customers using several different websites that I provide as part of my employer's business, used day in day out for everything, that all get updated on a regular basis and accessed from every kind of device you can think of, and not once has my answer ever involved clearing cookies or caches. Not once have *I* ever cleared a cache or cookies (any more than F5 would - and nowadays it basically does nothing more than trying to access the site again!). Not once has it ever solved a problem.
If I were allowed, such phrases would result in termination of technical support payments, along with rebooting (I'll accept a shutdown in order to change hardware, obviously, but just a plain restart/reboot shouldn't ever be required).
Now, if they asked "Are you using IE? Then please stop." I'd give *them* money.
Maybe the time has come to put it out of its misery?
That point only arrives when sufficient customers vote with their feet. Evidently too few have, so those who remain are happy with the service. At least we can sleep easy ignoring their squeals when the next Totally Shite Bank problem crops up.
I am leaving my bank, they used to be good. No, no TITSUP, just ... they have become un-contactable, they no longer reply to emails, they do not answer the phone, the only way is to head to the branch ... what is the bloody point.
Worse, when I opened my main account at the branch, I was offered an account at a "partner bank", they work so closely, I was told, they are one ... they did ask for 90 euros payment towards some fund that you get refunded should you leave, because it is some cooperative bank, all customers own at least a tiny share of the bank ... anyway, I have not received answers to my emails for 3 months, nor do they answer calls ... so I decide to close my accounts, obviously had to book an appointment at the branch for that as my email requesting the closures had not been read.
At the meeting, I say I want to close all my accounts, hand over my payment cards etc, request the monies to be put into another account, she asks which account, I say "in the email I sent you in December, maybe ?" She searches for quite a few minutes, finds the email and goes on mumbling why she had not complied.
I ask for the 90 euros back ... to which the clerk said: "Well, you can either give it to [redacted] (as in, do not ask for a refund) or you will have to contact [redacted] for that and I do not have their address, you can look it up on the internet."
For years, absolutely no problems at all, now, this ... well, at least their migration last year went well, even though all the account history vanished, my identifiers changed, and I could access my account without the card reader (bad) ... anyway ... another bank will be another load of crap ... if only I could live without these suckers, all they ever do is cost you for sod all service ...
PS: I transferred most of my funds to another bank last year because they offered better options, which may explain the shit above.
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