As ever, it has been a busy start to Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) 2021… Over the weekend, Santander in the UK suffered major technical issues affecting branch, telephone, online, app and card services. Sadly, according to figures compiled by the Financial Conduct Authority, this seems to be part of an ongoing problem, with Santander […]
Salesforce is still working to fully restore services to clients after a serious outage that began late last night. Initially their entire portfolio of customer relationship management services were inaccessible to users; but most were restored within a few hours. As a major player in the software-as-a-service industry, Salesforce are clearly focused on keeping their
Salesforce Outage – How Reliable are Cloud-Based Systems? Read More »
Virgin Money was in the news again on Tuesday when its digital services were hit by technical problems. It is reported that current account customers were unable to make transactions and access their accounts for much of Tuesday, with many expressing their frustration on social media. The timing was particularly unfortunate, coming at the start
Yesterday morning, millions of websites were off-line as fire raged through a data centre in Strasbourg. OVH is the fourth largest web-hosting provider in Europe (after AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud), and operates four data centres on the Strasbourg site. One 500m2 data centre was destroyed and another was damaged in the blaze; the
At around 1130 GMT yesterday, users around the world started experiencing difficulties using Google services such as YouTube and Gmail. Despite this, Google’s status dashboard continued to indicate that everything was working fine for some time. Meanwhile, Google’s search engine appears to have continued to work normally. The problem was quickly traced to an outage
We have often blogged about IT incidents within the banking sector and commented upon the frequency of these events; but how common are they? Since April 2018, UK banks have had to report “Operational and Security Incidents” affecting personal and business current accounts to the FCA if they reach any of the following thresholds: >
Twitter experienced a major outage last night, with tens of thousands of users around the world unable to use the platform for over an hour. The issue appears to have been resolved now and Twitter have stressed that there is no evidence of a security breach; attributing the outage to an “inadvertent change” to their
The National Cyber Security Centre has issued a specific alert to higher education institutions after a recent spike in attacks. In particular, both Northumbria and Newcastle Universities have come under attack in the last few weeks. These attacks come at the most critical time in the academic year, as universities recruit new students and prepare
There is a strong sense of “situation no change” as the 2020s began with three high-profile IT problems in the UK Financial Services Sector. Firstly, the on-line banking services and mobile apps for Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland (all part of the Lloyds Banking Group) were all disrupted on New Year’s Day. The disruption
