FNB CEO explains and apologizes for downtime

All branch hours will also be extended by an hour today to help customers who were inconvenienced,” said Jordaan.
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Great stuff! Good to see they're back up. Now all those people who threw a hissie fit and moved back to ABSA can move back to FNB again :p
 
The question is what the heck caused such a massive power surge ? Eskom ? If so then I feel sorry for the surrounding buildings they must have also experienced this. If it took out a Data centre then the poor offices with standard PC's must be screwed
 
He sent me a personal email and personally apologised, how's that!?
 
eddief1 said:
The question is what the heck caused such a massive power surge ? Eskom ? If so then I feel sorry for the surrounding buildings they must have also experienced this. If it took out a Data centre then the poor offices with standard PC's must be screwed
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Not eskom - seems to have been a City Power problem that affected both transformers leading into the Randburg datacenter.
 
I take it this can be classified as a Black Swan. An incident occurring that no-one anticipated and changes the way of life/work. I can bet FNB is now changing their recovery and DR procedures.
 
creeper said:
I take it this can be classified as a Black Swan. An incident occurring that no-one anticipated and changes the way of life/work. I can bet FNB is now changing their recovery and DR procedures.
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Man what a nightmare for the IT staff, wake up one morning and the whole DS is down, talk about stress!!
 
eddief1 said:
Man what a nightmare for the IT staff, wake up one morning and the whole DS is down, talk about stress!!
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More likely they were called in the night before to figure out wtf went wrong before people try to use the system the next day! :wtf:
 
“Indications suggest that this surge was in the range of 12,000 kVA, which is equivalent to eight times the strength of a typical lightning strike,” said Jordaan.
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Erm I would love to know where he got that numbers. Cause for some reason my math is failing me.
Lightning = 30-300 kA and V = potential gradient is 100+ per meter so if lightning was 2 odd meters
kVA = √3 × A · V / 1000

Taking kA as 30 kA and V as 240 gives me 12470.77 so in short its the smallest lightning strike not 8 times.

Anyway onto subject at hand, It sucked when I was at PnP on Wednesday and they went to cash only during the afternoon peak hour(Thank you FNB) Everyone then rushed to the ATM's outside forming long queu's.

Was not fun.
 
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How frequently do powerlines get overloaded in northern jhb? scared i come home and find everything blown up
 
new cleaning lady in the datacentre, plugged the wrong thing back after pulling the plug to do the vacuum :-)
strange though... i would have figured incoming power surge would have stopped at the big UPS/Generator? When I got the email, was just picturing 1000s of servers fried to a crisp
can imagine their electric bill with the council now... if we get a power spike at company, the rest of the month is billed at maximum rate.
Maybe Steve did some sabotage... everybody he calls about BEEEP bank just flipping him off.

was on FNB site this morning, to spend the freshly received salary on accounts, still not 100%, with delays.
good luck to the IT guys
 
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krycor said:
How frequently do powerlines get overloaded in northern jhb? scared i come home and find everything blown up
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This is the first I've heard of something like this happening...What's with the sad face next to Jhb for your location? :p
 
FNB Branch closed

My local branch (Bergville) is closed today. Related?

I drove 92km return to find this out :(

'bombproof' shuttering over the ATMs, so no banking available at all.
 
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***** happens, but hopefully this will teach them a lesson or two about redundant systems. Even though they had remote power they should have a satellite office which could come up in no time and save the day. Its unacceptable for a whole bank to be offline for more than a few minutes.
 
S1ght said:
This is the first I've heard of something like this happening...What's with the sad face next to Jhb for your location? :p
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Spikes and power outages are very common. Not to this extent though, this almost verges on industrial sabotage IMO :P Kudos to FNB for not playing the Alec Erwin card.
 
“Indications suggest that this surge was in the range of 12,000 kVA, which is equivalent to eight times the strength of a typical lightning strike,” said Jordaan.
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8 times the strength of a lightning strike... FNB must have some electrical connection to Eskom to be able to carry that amount of energy. A typical lightning strike is about 10,000 Amperes with millions of Volts, although it only lasts for about 30 microseconds.
 
Sorry but this is no excuse. Surely you have a DR plan in place, and one that is tested and audited? This is simple cost cutting from a poorly run IT department. The CIO should be sacked. Simple solution - run virtual and use a DR system like SRM...
 
hammell said:
Sorry but this is no excuse. Surely you have a DR plan in place, and one that is tested and audited? This is simple cost cutting from a poorly run IT department. The CIO should be sacked. Simple solution - run virtual and use a DR system like SRM...
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Ignorant post is ignorant.

Virtual mainframes? Lol!
 
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