Ulster Bank

[tbrick18]

Ah here - a creditor who's owed us since January had the cheeck to tell us today that he'd paid us last Wednesday, from his Ulster Bank account.  Jaysus.   

That's a gas; the honesty of folk is inspiring!

It stops being funny when pay-day arrives. 

+1
I dont bank with the UB, but my employer does! Meant to have been paid on Friday....still no word!

I did a placement year in UB way back in the 90's and I worked on some of their mainframe programs. From memory the batch jobs had failover in that if one crashed, the subsequent batch jobs didnt run. The general consensus was they didn't roll back, they'd just re-run the batch. Processed records would not be re-processed so they weren't concerned about a few corrupted records as generally the customers who these records pertained to would eventually complain to their branch. The branch would contact IT, who would query that customer's data and manually "fix" the data.
So if the customer didn't notice a problem...well I always wondered about that!
I don't ever remember there being a rollback in the entire time I was there. To do a rollback of a live mainframe db, which may well have had more transactions between the start and fail of a batch, is not straightforward either. An failed rollback could cause worse problems than a failed batch as if the rollback fails you have no reference point to go back or forward to.

That's a long time ago mind, and I was still green so I'm sure I probably missed the big picture about how it all worked and I'd imagine it has improved since then (or maybe not). I used to bank with UB, but left about 10 years ago for a variety of reasons....including customer service. They then tried to charge me close my account...I said feck that and left the account with £1. It's cost them a fortune since in statements.

If the problem was with a software update, it's very bad management on their part. The update should have been tested offline as should the deploy of that update. They should also have had a tried and tested rollback strategy should the udpate fail AND all data should have been backed up before starting.
If they had followed these measures for a software update, there shouldnt have been this level of problem. So either they didnt follow these measures, or they are spouting BS.

[Tony Baloney]

Re. the Ulster Bank - the world is still turning and no-one died. As long as these SQA muppets keep working in the  banking and stay away from the nuclear, aviation or pharmaceutical industry we'll survive.

[Cold tea]

Re. the Ulster Bank - the world is still turning and no-one died. As long as these SQA muppets keep working in the  banking and stay away from the nuclear, aviation or pharmaceutical industry we'll survive.

One poor child nearly did!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2164191/Family-s-fears-cancer-girl-die-Mexico-NatWest-glitch-meant-crucial-funds-transferred.html

[Tony Baloney]

Re. the Ulster Bank - the world is still turning and no-one died. As long as these SQA muppets keep working in the  banking and stay away from the nuclear, aviation or pharmaceutical industry we'll survive.

One poor child nearly did!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2164191/Family-s-fears-cancer-girl-die-Mexico-NatWest-glitch-meant-crucial-funds-transferred.html

Useless bastards. Crucially, my pay better be in tomorrow!

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

So it seems an inexperienced India-outsourced employee wiped bucket loads of data when backing out a patch, maybe they'll go easier on the peanuts the next time:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/rbs_natwest_ca_technologies_outsourcing/

[brokencrossbar1]

There is a sceptic in me sees something fishy in this whole thing.  I know for a fact that the Ulster Bank is completely fucked.  I have been doing a lot of work recently relating to Ulster bank lending and it is all over the shop.  The way money is tranferred into current accounts is through a clearing system which is pretty common knowledge, many banks over the years have used that "money" as collateral to "borrow" other money.  If, for talk sake, a bank withheld this money for a period of days for whatever reason it could conceiveably use it as "collateral" to borrow off other lending organisations.  I think this goes a lot deeper than a technical glitch.  I know of one case where an Ulster Bank branch refused to cash a cheque on a client account, which on the screen had the money, because it simply did not have enough money in its own "stock" to cover all its outgoing funds.  This to me is a scary scenario and I think there will be a bigger rumble very soon.  This may pass but the writing is very much on the wall, the whole shithouse is gonna go up in flames!!!

[TopofthePops]

Can I ask a moderator why my original comment was deleted??

[el_cuervo_fc]

Can I ask a moderator why my original comment was deleted??

What was it?

[el_cuervo_fc]

He said that someone got arrested for taking money he didn't own from a bank machine.

Interesting.  Any chance of a PM?

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

Can I ask a moderator why my original comment was deleted??

Probably because it was potentially libellous?

Scary stuff BCB1!

[Cold tea]

Unless he named people - it's hardly libellous!  But don't question the mods!

[maddog]

There is a sceptic in me sees something fishy in this whole thing.  I know for a fact that the Ulster Bank is completely fucked.  I have been doing a lot of work recently relating to Ulster bank lending and it is all over the shop.  The way money is tranferred into current accounts is through a clearing system which is pretty common knowledge, many banks over the years have used that "money" as collateral to "borrow" other money.  If, for talk sake, a bank withheld this money for a period of days for whatever reason it could conceiveably use it as "collateral" to borrow off other lending organisations.  I think this goes a lot deeper than a technical glitch.  I know of one case where an Ulster Bank branch refused to cash a cheque on a client account, which on the screen had the money, because it simply did not have enough money in its own "stock" to cover all its outgoing funds.  This to me is a scary scenario and I think there will be a bigger rumble very soon.  This may pass but the writing is very much on the wall, the whole shithouse is gonna go up in flames!!!

Are Ulster bank part of Natwest ? Presumably if one is in the brown stuff the other is ?

[AZOffaly]

This, from the report,

But in the process of backing out a major blunder was committed, according to our source. It was this error which made the task of restoring services so prolonged:

    When they did the back-out, a major error was made. An inexperienced person cleared the whole queue ... they erased all the scheduling.

That created a large backlog as all the wiped information had to be re-inputted to the system and reprocessed. A complicated legacy mainframe system at RBS and a team inexperienced in its quirks made the problem harder to fix, our source adds.

Sounds like waffle.

If they removed the scheduled jobs, it should have been very easy to reschedule them. A scheduler is just something that controls the execution of jobs, and conditions for execution, etc. Deleting the jobs from the queue would mean that you have never processed the information, and so it should be very easy to reschedule the jobs, or even wait until the next evening before processing two days at once.

It could be that they fucked up when they realised what they'd done, and made a mess of forcing jobs through to completion, which may have left transactions omitted, processed in the wrong order, incorrectly bypassed or whatever, but simply removing all the jobs from the queue on one night is not a reason for a week long downtime.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

See your point AZ, however, if the scheduled jobs were highly interdependent, ultrasensitively sequential, multitudinously threaded, and inscrutably piecemeal and fragmentary in nature, and decades of disparate systems' integration in the making, I would well believe the capacity therein for the mother of all snafus!

Your alternative scenario is probably the more likely though, in having said that.

[Hashtag]

A major haulage company in Northern Ireland has just changed it's bank account from Ulster Bank to AIB. I expect many to follow.

This is it for UB. I would suggest its time for mass panic. Get to your UB now and withdraw all your cash. That's what I will be doing.

May God have mercy on your souls. Best of luck to all.