[jacquesm]

I don't have anything to do with 'simple' but I'm working with a group of people on another system somewhere in the payment chain. In banking failure is not an option, a little detail that I keep having to drill into my collegues, some of who would rather have an MVP with the occasional bit of downtime than something a lot more solid. So for now we're stuck in the 'hurd' loop.

Within any start-up there are always differing opinions on the level of reliability required. My first real job in IT was with the Dutch division of the Chase Mannhattan bank, they made it pretty clear upon hiring me that they did not mind hiring me into a responsible position as young as I was but that my first fuck-up would also be my last. I'm not sure if they would actually follow through on that promise but it certainly made me a bit more wary and more responsible. The fact that I ended up leaving of my own accord means that their threat probably had its intended effect.

When you're in the payment chain, whether as an IPSP, a bank or something else that directly affects peoples income and ability to function in society you have no excuse other than 'meteor fragments took out all three of our datacenters'.

Stuff is up, check-totals are at '0', transactions are never lost. 24 hours, 365 (of 366) days per year.

If you can't do that don't bother playing.

The bank I'm with (Rabobank in nl) lost a lot of respect from me (after building that up for 2 decades) when they blamed a bunch of down time on 'hackers'. What bugged me even more than the fact that they were down was the fact that they wanted to blame another party for being down.

The one thing I'll leave a little bit of room for is capacity issues during the holiday shopping spree, but even that is pretty bad form and indicative of very bad planning.

Judging by the post the error lies with Simple's partner, unfortunately for Simple customers will likely not care about that at all. To them their simple card doesn't work when they expect it to work.

I hope for simple they'll be able to fix this very quickly.

[hrktb]

This is the right stance I believe. Sadly there seems to be a more and more failures creeping up in banking and payment processing areas, and people seem to get used to it. I had two different banks fail on me (operations not actually aknowledged when the interface was showing otherwise, error on payments because of misreadings of the state of the accounts, two factor authentication down under peak load) the last month.

It feels a bit like when the general public got used to see computer fails, and "the computer is never wrong" mental image became a "it crashes from times to times, you just have to reboot" one.

[hosay123]

Just to contrast this a little, what you paint here is a panacea, while the reality is that even just this year 10 million accounts in the UK were out of order for a period of months due to a reliability problem: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how-natwest...

[jacquesm]

That looks like their settlement batches were no longer accepted. They deserve to lose their customers / go bust over that. Natwest will survive because not all their customers care about such stuff to the same extent, some may not even find out. Others are bound by their mortgages to have checking accounts with Natwest.

I didn't say that those things don't happen. I said that they are not acceptable. The fact that others fuck up does not give you an excuse to fuck up.

These are exactly the kind of discussions that I was hinting at above.