What caused Standard Bank's downtime on Saturday

Jan

Jan

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Standard Bank outage — here's what caused it

Standard Bank's services suffered extensive downtime on Saturday, 21 May 2022, due to a component failure that resulted in its engineers rebuilding the system's architecture.

The bank revealed the reason for the failure during a media briefing on Tuesday, where Standard Bank CEO Lungisa Fuzile apologised for the outage.
 
Cost us a few Rands in our business last Saturday, we have 2 Standard Bank Credit Card machines and were basically stuffed the whole day, came back on at 3pm and the day was literally over.

Was thinking of making a claim to Merchant Services.
 
BTTB said:
Cost us a few Rands in our business last Saturday, we have 2 Standard Bank Credit Card machines and were basically stuffed the whole day, came back on at 3pm and the day was literally over.

Was thinking of making a claim to Merchant Services.
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They probably have some fine print nobody ever reads that makes them not liable for losses suffered
 
One generic switch? No fail over network, how does a bank not have any kind of DR?

Looking at those failures they most likely hand out cowboy hats and admin access to all their devs too.

Saw people leave full trolleys at Makro at the weekend due to their cards declining
 
Bluran said:
One generic switch? No fail over network, how does a bank not have any kind of DR?

Looking at those failures they most likely hand out cowboy hats and admin access to all their devs too.

Saw people leave full trolleys at Makro at the weekend due to their cards declining
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It was all done using agile. Agile is generic and fast and requires no DR.
 
r00igev@@r said:
I smell BS. "Generic switch" and rebuilding architecture? Pull my other finger.
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Yeah, it is a bit vague or maybe the media briefing didn't want to complicate the matters.

Very strange there is no failover no redundancy. I speculate that there was redundancy and at some time it failed and the redundancy became the primary. They then half arsed around until the redundancy itself failed too and only then did they scrambled to fix it.

That or the redundancy system was severely underspec'd and when failover kicked in the redundancy systems just could not keep up with normal traffic.
 
r00igev@@r said:
It was all done using agile. Agile is generic and fast and requires no DR.
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Then they missed the memo on what Agile actually is. This is bad governance and not planning for failure, you could pull that off even running waterfall projects
 
Its simple, Standard bank decided that rather than spend less than 1mil to make sure that single point of failure did not exist, they decided its better for its customers to lose 10+ million in cancelled transactions, payment chaos and lost business opportunities.
 
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