Internet Banking Down!

  • jaffacake's Avatar
    Was trying to do my accounting tonight, but internet banking died on me about half an hour ago and hasn't come back. Sorry, there's been a system problemIt's our fault, not yours.To get help contact us and mention: Time of the system problem: 23:29 Reference: 200Otherwise, please close your browser and try again. I've restarted my browser several times without success. A banner message tells of upcoming essential maintenance, but that isn't scheduled until this time tomorrow.

    "Due to essential maintenance, Online Banking will be unavailable from 10pm Wednesday 6th April until the morning of Thursday 7th April."

    So I can't do it tonight, as you are down...and I can't do it tomorrow night, as you plan to be offline then too. Access through the app is also broken.
  • 13 Replies

  • jaffacake's Avatar
    Just spoken by phone to your internet helpdesk who tell me that the system is down tonight for planned maintenance - unsurprisingly they sounded very busy. Apparently you have gone off-line for changes related to the end of the tax year. Funnily enough, we all have things to do at the end of the tax year, but we don't dump our clients off-line for it. I'm told systems will also be off-line tomorrow evening. There is no announcement online about downtime this evening and there hasn't been a single mention of downtime on any of your twitter feeds. Utterly useless.
  • jaffacake's Avatar
    [img]/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/101iE5904F418F76A40C/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1[/img] It's Tuesday, not Wednesday.
  • jaffacake's Avatar
    Have now been told on twitter that there was NOT scheduled maintenance last night: [img]/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/102i7524D430E1515A8A/image-size/original?v=mpbl-1&px=-1[/img] So shall I assume the man in your internet banking call centre lied to me?

    I just want to do my accounts and staff who lie in the course of the job aren't really helping are they?
  • joannamcc's Avatar
    Employee
    @jaffacake

    Hi, I'm really sorry for the conflicting information you were given. There was an outage last night so the information my colleague gave you was correct. At the moment, we don't inform our customers of every outage however we're collating feedback for review with regards to this.

    I can see you have made a complaint with us today about this, we will look into it for you and you can find information about our complaints procedures by clicking on this link.
  • jaffacake's Avatar
    The information your colleague gave was NOT correct. He told me there was planned, scheduled downtime. Clearly it was an unplanned outage, so the information wasn't correct at all. This wasn't just a few minutes of downtime, I periodically retried until after 2am and service never came back. Your colleague on the phone had told me it wouldn't be back up until 7am but, as I wouldn't be home then, I kept trying anyway - I got nowhere. We are talking hours of unannounced downtime without any real explanation. My questions: 1) Why did systems go offline for many hours without warning?2) Are you really going to take systems off-line for another night tonight, given there was no service last night?3) Will services be available on Thursday night?4) Have you reviewed the tape where your colleague clearly lied to me?5) Why have a community forum if it doesn't even communicate planned downtime?6) Why have a twitter help feed if you don't communicate planned downtime on it?7) Do you think it's acceptable to have significant downtime for customers without even mentioning it? If I wanted a bank that was only available in the daytime, I wouldn't have signed up for an on-line bank. Like many, I work for a living, so having unannounced downtime during the only period I am not working is rather unacceptable.
  • StephenO's Avatar
    Employee
    Hi , Thank you for getting back to us. We’ve let you down in this instance and we are sorry. The team you spoke to on the phone gave you the correct information, however you were provided with the wrong information on Twitter, and we apologise for this confusion. We had planned updates happening to our systems which required our online platform to become unavailable for Savings customers last night. Tonight’s update will affect all products, however customers will still be able to service their accounts through our telephone banking service. The online services will be available from early on Thursday morning.

    We try to minimise the impact to our customers by carrying out necessary outages through the night, however we understand the frustration of not being able to access your accounts online and we try to minimise the time it is unavailable. Please be assured, we will be looking again at how we communicate planned outages to customers in the future to prevent this from happening again.
  • jaffacake's Avatar
    It just makes no sense to me that you would post up loads of notice that you planned downtime on Wednesday night but not mention at all that you were also going to prevent access to my accounts on Tuesday night. Surely this maintenance goes through the same change control, so why not the same customer notification? It just doesn't add up to me. Clearly you recognised that you need to notify customers about extended downtime, hence the posts about the Wednesday night work. So why no mention of the Tuesday night maintenance? Perhaps you realised people might take issue with systems being down two nights in a row? I know I do. I think it's entirely unacceptable for maintenance to be performed two nights running - especially at year end when people are trying to reconcile their accounts. I think at a minimum you shouldn't notify customers in advance of any planned downtime in excess of 30 minutes, an hour at most. You should post these notifications through your twitter feed and this forum - it would really add value. Additionally, perhaps a notification could be built into the Tesco app? I have a widget that normally displays my account balances on my phone screen, so perhaps it could be modified to let people know in advance when it is going to break. The problem last night affected more than my savings account, I was also unable to access my current account. Basically I couldn't get to any of my money or pay any of my bills. I believe a 10pm cut off for maintenance is too early in the evening, maintenance should start no earlier than midnight to give customers some time in the evening to perform their necessary tasks. I leave for work before 7am and rarely get home before 8pm. By the time I've put my children to bed and had my dinner, that doesn't leave me much time to do banking - so when it goes down without notice, it's rather frustrating. Perhaps any other customers who are tracking this thread might want to "Like" this post if they would also like to see improved notification of downtime?
  • NickJ's Avatar
    Employee
    Hi , I'm sorry about the trouble you’ve had. Online banking should definitely be making life easier for you! Your situation has highlighted an area we need to improve in and you’ve also made a couple of great suggestions on how to do this. We’re going to go away and see how we might use our social channels to keep customers more up to date with any planned outages of our app or website. Can I ask you to put your app suggestion on the latest mobile app update.