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Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable: * https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-customers-facing-payday-without-pay https://ww

Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable: * https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-customers-facing-payday-without-pay https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect) * https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-meltdown-report-computer-failure-accounts https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-melt... (Insufficiently tested software upgrade although to be fair this was a major upgrade) * https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-prevents-customer-access-to-accounts https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-pre... (Not sure on root cause. Other interesting stats at the bottom of the article regarding failure counts) Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc. It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.

listenallyall 5y ago
Thanks, these examples confirm my point. The old, ancient, "outdated" (as the original poster claimed) software worked fine for years/decades. The failures that you cited were introduced during an upgrade, a rewrite/outsourcing, or due to a 3rd party outage.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  But requirements change, so upgrades are a normal part of business, due to at the bare minimum legal reporting requirements changing, even if there weren't all sorts of new things like internet banking making their old APIs inadequate. If the software isn't extendable or changeable then it isn't 'working fine', because if you can't offer internet banking or do FATCA reporting you go out of business or get shut down.

listenallyall 5y ago

Thanks, these examples confirm my point. The old, ancient, "outdated" (as the original poster claimed) software worked fine for years/decades. The failures that you cited were introduced during an upgrade, a rewrite/outsourcing, or due to a 3rd party outage.

snovv_crash 5y ago
But requirements change, so upgrades are a normal part of business, due to at the bare minimum legal reporting requirements changing, even if there weren't all sorts of new things like internet banking making their old APIs inadequate. If the software isn't extendable or changeable then it isn't 'working fine', because if you can't offer internet banking or do FATCA reporting you go out of business or get shut down.