OT: Harry - WTF is going on in the UK? Massive bank problem halts transactions for 5'th day(!)

[Home Guy]

Wow, I knew the UK was f***ed up (socially, economically) - but this takes the cake.

I guess it's only a matter of time before the Royal Army begins "training" excercises on UK streets.

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As RBS' ATM "Glitch" Enters Fifth Day, The Bailed Out Bank Issues A Statement

Over the past week, various entities controlled by bailed out UK-bank RBS, focusing primarily on NatWest, have seen clients unable to access virtually any of their funds, perform any financial transactions, or even get an accurate reading of their assets. The official reason: "system outage"... yet as the outage drags on inexplicably for the 5th consecutive day, the anger grows, as does speculation that there may be more sinister reasons involved for the cash hold up than a mere computer bug.

The difficulties, which have hit NatWest, RBS and Ulster Bank users, are entering their fifth day. RBS said the backlog had been caused by a ?system outage? on Tuesday, and that it was ?working around the clock? to resolve it.

Some customers said their home purchases or holiday plans had been plunged into chaos by the glitches, while others vowed to switch banking provider. Fears have been raised that thousands could be hit with penalty charges if their regular bill payments, such as for their mortgage, are affected. Consumer groups called on the banking behemoth to provide ?appropriate compensation? to those customers who suffer as a consequence of the ?failure?.

It appears the difficulties have hit hardest at NatWest, which has more than 7.5m personal banking customers. RBS Group said it could not tell how many had been affected as it was not possible to know when they were expecting payments into their accounts.

Susan Allen, customer services director for RBS NatWest retail, said it was difficult to say exactly when all the problems would be resolved. She said they had been due to ?an error in our system which we believe we have now fixed but we are clearing the backlog?.

[Bill]

It is almost impossible to "test" new software for a very large and complex computer network like that. Problems crop up when it is installed and 3 zillion people start using it for all their transactions.

Similar problems happened recently with an electronic stock exchange called BATS. And there were problems recently with the NASDAQ stock exchange when 4 zillion people started trading Facebook all at once.

This stuff happens...

[Home Guy]

The BATS ipo meltdown was orchestrated by Nasdaq.

Zerohedge wrote several articles on that, complete with milli-second by milli-second graphs showing how the trades took the stock value down to zero in (I think) a few minutes.