Electronic Banking Systems Crashing - are these practice runs?

Tens of thousands of Westpac-owned St George Bank, Bank of Melbourne and BankSA customers were reeling on Monday following an outage of online, mobile, and telephone banking at the banks.
To add further salt to customers' wounds, the banks branches were closed on Monday in NSW, Queensland, South Australia, and the ACT due to the Labour Day public holiday.

Some responses from those who were unprepared for the crash (I would probably be one of them if it happened to my bank)

"Went out for lunch and couldn't transfer money to pay was extremely embarrassing!" wrote St George customer Jules Lewis on the bank's Facebook page on Sunday afternoon.
"All plans now cancelled for this evening as we have no access to funds without internet or phone banking....cheers St George."
Wrote another customer, Chris Garrett: "Thanks St George, for the ruined long weekend. Thank you for confining my family to the house as our holiday plans require us to access our money... This is an absolute joke.
"You will be losing a record amount of customers come Tuesday."
Wrote another, Brianne Lowe: "This is absolutely ridiculous!! It's a public holiday and we can't go anywhere or do anything! I can't put petrol in my car, can't buy nappies and I cannot do my food shopping so I have no idea what we will be eating for dinner.
"Hurry up and get it fixed. Your IT guys need a kick up the ass."

Read more here

So this wouldn't be ATS worhty except that it happened to another bank a few weeks ago - twice, and I thought there was another bank this happened to recently too. This is not a common ocurrance in Australia, but 3 (or is it 4) times in less than a month is just a coincidence of course. I wonder if this is a practice run by the evil powers that be to see what would really happen in such a situation, as till now it is all specualtion based on Cyprus, Greece and some South American countries.

The other systems crash:
Customers stranded at supermarkets, atms and service stations.
Same kind of responses by people relying on "money" being there for day to day necessities.

Happened here too in canada with two different interact companies on two different days, Thursday and Friday. These companies provide the terminals and connection.They had communication problems which rendered the devices useless.

The cashier told me it was nation wide. Need to check up on that. I have a hard time finding anything on this maybe it was just local, but worh your post it doesn't look that way.

Sillies, once you give your money to the banks, its not yours anymore, its theirs.

You can bet, that's a glimpse of what may come, because most people relay too much on a bank system, that if anything such as this is prolonged, can pretty much create chaos in Urban Centers.

As the old saying goes "Do not put all your eggs in one basket", should be considered a rule of thumb

Peace

Here's my question - Why do people keep ALL their money in the bank? Why do folks depend solely on digital money? I Never put all my money in the bank. I keep a small fire proof safe [ hidden and bolted to the floor ] in the house and always have cash on hand. Swiping a card has become far too easy and then people are completely lost when it fails.

a reply to: DAVID64

Well....You could say that to just about any technology that we've been using for centuries or even decades! E.g many people use cell phones for everything now a days, not just banking but to organize their entire lives! So you take that a way from them, you've stripped them of a very powerful tool that makes them now extremely vulnerable to stress and are forced to adapt to doing things the old fashioned way.

So in a way I more less agree with you, I guess most of the people effected and even those unaffected could take it as a lesson to find other mediums to store their funds to prevent future complications. Which to say is kind of surprising that many didn't consider it before hand now that you mention it...

Electronic Banking Systems Crashing - are these practice runs? - No they are watch and see sessions to see what can be learnt for planning purposes.

originally posted by: Azureblue
Electronic Banking Systems Crashing - are these practice runs? - No they are watch and see sessions to see what can be learnt for planning purposes.

Thats what I meant

I work in IT for the other bank you're referring to, that recently had a string of outages. There was a planned upgrade that didn't go as expected and created some knock-on effects. It took the engineers ages to find & fix the root cause. It definitely wasn't a 'practise run'

At an educated guess I'd say St George/Westpac broke a network flow during a router/firewall/proxy config change and it prevented a few systems from talking to each other.

a reply to: Cinrad

This has also happened to customers of some banks in the UK. Can't say whether it's a practice run for anything but could well be a sign of things to come if all electricity failed and there was a blackout for a week!

Here's my question - Why do people keep ALL their money in the bank? Why do folks depend solely on digital money?

Simple answer.

It is how we get paid. Folks don't want to get a physical check and then cash it. They want access to their funds the moment they get paid. Not to mention, most bills are set up to be paid electronically, etc. Do you want to go back to mailing it in with stamps, etc.? I mean, you could...but obviously, most don't.

That said, we typically withdraw any non-bill money in cash just because it is easier to track and we do a lot of activities with others, so it's easier to just pay our share in cash and be done with it. Usually cheaper to get gas with cash around here too, vs. credit.