Here is what I know
Long before the hedge funds took over the Bank was trying to update its IT systems. It made a complete rickets of this and after spending hundreds of millions dropped it. This contributed to the hole in the accounts but a major problem seemed to be managers with egos bigger than their intelligence. Now as the world is run by accountants and they want their spreadsheets to be simple they wanted to have just one line for IT. So they out-source the infrastructure provision to IBM, having years ago out-sourced the program development, but in an effort to keep down the cost of the contract they failed to correctly identify all the key components of the service. Now some poxy little Windows server can fail and interrupt service to the highly resilient expensively maintained bits.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
