You should be unforgiving. I have no idea what the root cause behind this is but testing roll-over is obviously part & parcel of the level of reliability required in the financial world.
Allowed: scheduled downtime announced ahead of time for reporting, unscheduled downtime with localized effect due to 'acts of god'. Not allowed: customers can't access their funds when they should be able to.
When you disrupt the banking industry you especially should be doing at least as good as the established parties do in the reliability department.
Let's hope they have it fixed very quickly or it may well kill Simple.
Imagine being in a bar somewhere right now and having just bought a round finding out that you can't pay for it. You'll hear about that one for years.
you especially should be doing at least as good as the established parties do in the reliability department.
Easy to say but I think it is unreasonable to expect a company that is couple years old to have as much reliability as ones who have had decades to figure it out.
I think the Simple customers have every right be absolutely pissed. For some, they may even realize that the downside of going with Simple isn't justified by the upside. Hopefully, for the majority of Simple users the upside will make the rare downtime bearable.
My view would change if this becomes a regular occurrence with Simple. But that does not seem to be the case.
You can't build financial software the same way that you build some CRUD site or the latest social fad.
No one is arguing that you should be able to do that. And it is kind of insulting to imply that that is how the folks at Simple look at development without some source.
Systems break for many reasons, and you can't simply assume the cause to be a social fad attitude of the dev team.
I highly doubt Simple's invite-only early-adopters are dependent on their Simple card as their only way to buy beer and/or (your downthread example) gas for the drive home. (And I hope they're not using their card for both on the same night.) #firstWorldProblems
You really should have a look at how Simple bills itself. They bill themselves expressly as a replacement for your bank. The whole idea is that you absolutely rely on simple to do their thing or you might as well not use them.
If Simple is used the way they intend you to use them those scenarios are playing out right now. You really can't shift the blame for that onto those that believed the Simple proposition and acted as though simple was going to deliver.
Ordinary everyday people do not do single-point-of-failure analysis on their wallet, they simply expect it to work.
And as noted in my other comment, my giant banks have failed in similar ways, leaving my to my own other options or simply shit-outta-luck for a few hours. You seem to have a similar complaint above about 'Rabobank'.
I don't see any marketing claim on the Simple site that they'll have fewer outages than the Rabobanks/BofAs of the world. (Where do you see that claim, or actual delivered level of service, from any actual existing bank?)
Those set the stage for some pretty high expectations, they make it plain simple expects to be your sole provider.
Rabobank fucked up once in 20 years, and then only on a peripheral part of their service (ATM and point-of-sale still worked). If they had dropped the ball on either I'd be out of there for sure.
This just in: people tweeting also sometimes embellish their situations for dramatic effect!
For example, in surrounding tweets @Skroob jokes about paying with Bitcoin, mentions his dining party has other options, and then despite some disappointment concludes with sympathy for @Simplify. He further says that Simple's "company policy of ignoring the s* out of HN, especially during outages" is something that "just makes me love you guys more".
So: while non-customer HNers with crazy-high standards whinge, real customers can laugh about the situation (and even laugh about HN's negativity-bias).
Exactly. No one is denying this isn't a terrible thing. I don't think we have to convince Simple that this can't be happening. And I don't think one major downtime is reason enough to call for their heads as several of the comments imply. At the least let's wait for them to do the detail write up about the outage.