On the day before Christmas Eve, usually the day with the highest turnover
of the year in all shops, the whole Swiss debit-card (EC-Card) processing
system of Telekurs broke down for more than two hours. Also getting Money
from ATM's and the processing of on-line MasterCard credit card payments,
which is handled by the same company, was interrupted.
In Switzerland the debit card "EC card" is quite popular and nearly everyone
with an bank account has one of these and also most people use it more or
less often. With the EC card, you can get money on ATM's and pay your goods
in shops and restaurant by swiping the card and entering your PIN code (no,
I don't go into that) like an credit card but the amount is deducted
directly and immediately from your bank account.
Now on Saturday 23 Dec 2000 at 13:15, a tape robot in an automated tape
library in the data center of Telekurs, the sole operator of all EC card
transactions, drops a tape on the floor which in turn leads to an error
propagation which shuts down the whole EC and MasterCard card processing for
approximately two and a half hours until 15:25.
The impact was quite unpleasant: thousands of frustrated people unable to
pay the Christmas presents for their loved, high revenue losses for the
shops on the most important day of the year and more than 100,000
transactions rejected.
What do we learn from this? The usual story: don't put all your eggs in the
same basket; have better failure recovery procedures in place for such an
important system, it should not be possible that a dropped tape brings the
processing of all transactions to a grinding halt.
For reference coverage by the media (in German):
http://archiv.nzz.ch/books/nzzmonat/0/$72NB6$T.html
Andre Oppermann [Andre Oppermann via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 20]
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