Egg scrambles to fix network outage

Website blackout 'nothing to do with credit card cull'

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in IT Director, 6th February 2008 13:19 GMT

Tune into our application security webcast, click here

Egg has returned its website to normal operation after a "serious network outage" forced it to temporarily suspend services on Tuesday.

The UK-based online bank took its website down following an "internal network failure" at around 1100 GMT on Tuesday. Services weren't fully restored until around 1200 GMT on Wednesday.

A spokeswoman for the bank explained that a number of fixes had to be implemented and servers rebooted following the internal network failure. Egg clients were directed to its call centres during the outage. This left customers temporarily with a lower level of service even after they got through on the phone, because certain functions in Egg accounts are only available online.

Last week Egg began implementing plans to close 161,000 credit card accounts of customers (or seven per cent of its user base) whose credit scores had deteriorated since they took out credit. Some of the affected customers have come forward to dispute this, arguing that their credit facilities are been culled because they pay their bills in full each month and are therefore less profitable to the bank.

The web outage was unrelated to this credit card culling process, a spokeswoman for the bank told El Reg. ®

See what The Register's experts have to say on application security