I used to work on the digital side of banking — it’s so delicate. Old systems and patches on software. Every bank is one line of code away from this kind of crash.
I worked for a legacy building society they were still using COBOL jobs to process transactions as of 2021. They had two oracle databases, read and write. Customers would see the read database and it would be taken offline overnight and replaced with the latest data from the ‘write’ database.
I’d never discuss specific clients / employees on social media because I respect them all too much, but one particular bank I did a lot with still had 6.5m active customer records on dat tapes and drives and couldn’t get them on the cloud. 2/3 of their book.
I have no idea how Barclays runs internally but the last time I built a bank we ensured it could run with minimal downtime and that there would never be any risk of data loss or corruption.
I used to know in depth how Barclays worked. I worked on a fair amount of it, but that was a while ago and banks change (apart from HSBC of course - which still runs on steam power and candles).
Barclays were quite good at this stuff back in the day.
Ah HSBC, their “Open business account” system handled names with an apostrophe in them, sadly their automatic trigger to the “Create business account” didn’t.
Of course this is nothing new. There have been similar incidents with various banks over the years. Usually around pay day. There are still batch based systems at the core of these banks and occasionally they fail. It takes quite a bit of effort to undo the damage of such a batch failure.
Interestingly, everything seems to be working (even the notifications) but the transactions aren't showing up on the account summary page of the app. So, the data isn't getting from the main transactional systems to the app systems.
There is rarely a single operational data store that all the different systems query. Like all (bad) corporate architectures the data sloshes around between systems, each of which is its own monolith (even if it was implemented as micro services).
Ugh, legacy banks. Just in case you hadn't realised it yet, Monzo can set you up with an account with a functional app (and a payment card via Apple Pay/Google Pay, before the physical one shows up) within minutes.
Comments
I’d never discuss specific clients / employees on social media because I respect them all too much, but one particular bank I did a lot with still had 6.5m active customer records on dat tapes and drives and couldn’t get them on the cloud. 2/3 of their book.
I have no idea how Barclays runs internally but the last time I built a bank we ensured it could run with minimal downtime and that there would never be any risk of data loss or corruption.
Then again that was in the public sector ;)
Barclays were quite good at this stuff back in the day.
Doh.
A data flow failure is immediately spotted and you can roll back, freeze or roll forward using the panopticon
This time, the data didn't move properly.
Now seems to be resolved
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y7dpdje6xo
We just get a generic statement about "technical issues".
This applies to every IT issue.
Can we get beyond reports of "technical issues"?
A publicly available root cause analysis would be a step forward.
I'm sure they'd be happy with a chirpy message like that in lieu of making a mortgage payment.