Barclays online banking takes a dive
Again?
Posted in Management, 7th September 2009 10:22 GMT
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Barclays online banking services are mainly unavailable this morning.
Several customers emailed The Register to complain that, once again, they could not access their accounts.
A spokeswoman for Barclays confirmed there was a problem and promised us a call back when they knew what it was.
Either the bank has been plagued with problems or a disproportionate number of Reg readers use the bank's online services.
In July the service went down after a new version of the site, and associated marketing push, was launched. In June it lost its ATM network and watched its website crash twice.
It had similar problems in October of last year too.
Can't be anything to do with all those IT department redundancies, can it? ®
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COMMENTS
Barclays online banking
Not only did Barclays online banking take a dive on the 7th September, on both that day and the 6th September it stopped sending payments by the Faster Payments System. Even phoning up their so-called helpline was useless as they could say why or even whn it would be able to do so again. All they could do was to tell me that the payment was not going via FPS.
Barclays & O2
Barclays is to banking what O2 is to mobile phone networks. All show and no go. All fart and no shit. Maybe they share IT consultants, it would explain why neither can maintain a reasonable service to their customers.
RBS is golden
I have never had a problem with the RBS Online banking system. Not once. I am an early adopter too.
How can banks claim that your money is safe with them if its held on unreliable systems. Lets face it money is just numbers on a computer nowadays and if they can't get their computers to behave then I would not trust them with my money.
@AndrueC
Agree entirely about the ads, and what this says about their view of their customers. They have a comparable approach to their Premier customers - as soon as I 'upgraded' to that they started cold calling me regularly, clearly trying to get their hooks into me.
See my previous post - I'm in the process of signing up with Smile. So far I've been very impressed on the phone; I've actually get through to someone after 2 rings, who even sounds human. I'll let you know how I get on - see you back in the comments for the next Barclays outage? ;-)
Paris for solidarity...
Not a surprise
I have had a number of dealings with Barclays over the years as my company (I'm a contractor of 15 years) has been engaged to deliver a number of projects for them. They do seem very disorganised. They have too much beaucracy, put in place in a blunt attempt to reduce the number of unforeseen outages. However, this might be ok if they weren't also trying to reduce their cost base by laying off staff and putting in place completely unrealistic project timescales (I mean why if something like testing should take 2 weeks say do they allow just 2 days in the plan and then refuse to move on it) . The end result of all this cost cutting and beaucracy are projects that fail to deliver(services like online banking) , stressed out staff (a lot of some really good staff with invaluable knowledge have moved on) and of course low morale. I doubt that those with the power to change things this will consider doing anything as their bonuses are based on headcount and cost cutting, not necessarily on performance, etc. As such, I doubt that this will be the last outage at Barlcays we read about here.....
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