[xedarius]

I am a TSB customers and the service has been insane.

Here's some of the highlights

- Login screen regularly throws a message from the backend saying 'java.lang.NullPointerException' (so now I know what the backend written in)

- My balance was totalled incorrectly, which made me appear to be very wealthy.

- Payments had gone missing from my statement (how do I know they were missing, one of them was my pay)

- When I did login I tried to transfer some funds and was met with 'Payment successful' followed by a java.lang.IndexOutOfBoundsException. Had the payment worked? Who knows

- They have a fundamental scaling issue.

I've never seen anything like it. I do not get the impression this will be fixed quickly.

[kalleboo]

> When I did login I tried to transfer some funds

There is no way in hell I'd be attempting a transfer when the bank is in this state. I'd borrow cash from friends, take out a payday loan, sell the family jewels, anything else.

[edf13]

Don't payday loan...

Even though TSB will pay you back with interest the fact that you've used the payday loan will sit on your credit file and damage your history in the eyes of some companies.

[risotto_groupon]

The point of a payday loan is they DON'T report to credit bureaus... I'm sorry but this is complete malarky. Payday loans are terrible terrible financial instruments and should never be used as credit...

but I have used a payday loan in the past for an emergency when my wife needed to extend her job hunt by 3 weeks and we had credit that was about to go to collections and my guaranteed annual bonus was a month out.

There are some cases where a payday loan can be used effectively to PREVENT damage to your credit history.

[edf13]

They do... I've seen it. (UK)

And I've also been told (By financial industry credit checks) it being on a report is seen unfavourably.

[xedarius]

I agree, however I had bills to pay, it's the end of the month.

[Silhouette]

This is the crazy thing. It's all very well TSB executives making positive noises about not penny-pinching and making sure customers don't lose out, but usually when banks say these kinds of things after an outage, they are talking about things like waiving their own fees or making good any resulting late payment fees or missing interest. Obviously that sort of response would be nowhere near sufficient in this case if, for example, someone gets the utilities at their home cut off for non-payment, or a business gets into trouble for not being able to file its tax returns on time, or a small trader can't work because they can't buy materials or accept payments from customers. The true financial cost of an entire bank being out of service for a week is going to be staggering.

[akerro]

>(so now I know what the backend written in)

Since ever internal pages like your accounts, transfers etc had suffix .jsp so that's not a secret.

It's interesting to see that credit cards work fine, but debit cards and online statuses don't. I'm also lucky to have emergency funds on Monzo and in cryptocurrencies.

[pbhjpbhj]

Had some friends worked for LloydsTSB a few years before it was split up, working on COBOL (sorry, brainfart). I imagine there's a lot of legacy code to interface with.

Edit: I'm prone to idiocy.

[Graham24]

That's curious, I'd have thought Cobol would be more appropriate for a bank.

[pbhjpbhj]

And you'd be right, of course. Edited.

[3pt14159]

Why don’t you just bank elsewhere?

[sbarre]

If I was a TSB customer, the second this was all resolved I would move 100% of my business away from them and never look back.

I'm sure there are plenty of people waiting to do just that.

[swarnie_]

British banks are developing a bit a of a habit for massive IT failures. Moving is fine but someone else will fail next month.

[twic]

Although, as the article mentions, TSB are owned by a Spanish bank, Sabadell, and it was the move to Sabadell's platform, developed in Spain, that caused the trouble!

[xedarius]

Well before the system migration they rented their online services from LLoyds, and it it was great. Also if you go into a TSB branch they're really good. So until now, I've been happy.

[Silhouette]

I have a lot of sympathy for TSB's branch staff right now. Previously I'd say they had a good reputation compared to a lot of other high street banks here, but right now they're on the front line dealing with customers who are suffering due to a catastrophic failure, and in reality there is probably very little they can say or do to help. Presumably some of those customers are very angry by now and some of them won't be very polite about it, but it's not the front-line staff's fault this happened any more than it's that customer's.

[gaius]

Because it’s a chicken and egg situation