[CornishPasty]

Was the original BERT formatting from the Hub or from something inside the Gateway's network? I always associated BERT with Erlang, do you know if it was involved or if it was something else?

Cheers for this blog post, by the way. It was really informative about the issue, and about how FPS works.

[robinson-wall]

It's used exclusively inside the Gateway's infrastructure. They're a mix of Java and Erlang but I'm not sure on the proportion.

FPS uses ISO8583 for its messaging format, and I suspect at the edge the Gateway translates it to a BERT blob for passing around internally.

[CornishPasty]

Ah right that makes sense.

It seems odd that it took them so long to identify and rectify the issue. Have they made you any assurances about what they'll do to reduce this time/prevent this from happening in future?

[robinson-wall]

Specifically this class of incident? Yes. They seem to be reasonably good at operational runbooks for known flaws, so I can imagine this class of incident being handed faster in future.

What worries me is the next unknown unknown, which is why we are insourcing. One thing I think Monzo can be particularly proud of is our incident response, and debugging of our own systems at speed.

That's why this article focuses more on what actions we are taking, and not what actions they are taking.