This past weekend in Canada, one of our 5 major banks, the Toronto-Dominion,
experienced a serious systems failure. This caused particular problems
because Canadians use debit cards more than any other nation, in fact, many
people (including me) carry only a debit card and credit card in their
wallet, and no cash.
The Tuesday, October 30, 2001 _Globe and Mail_ reports in
"TD aims to clear backlog following system crash" that:
'The crash was caused by the failure of a single "motherboard" in one of
the bank's central computers at about 11 a.m. Saturday [Oct 27, 2001].
This "gradually started to shut down the system" to "protect the
integrity" of the data already there, Mr. Livingston [head of TD
electronic banking] said.'
Then this remarkable statement
'It was a purely random event," he said, adding that hardware failures are
rare. "This has never happened before, and it will likely never happen
again."'
and ending with
'As TD sought to identify and fix the problem, "a few million
transactions" were rejected by the bank's systems, which, on a busy
Saturday, process up to 500 transactions a second, he said.
The bank's computer systems have all sorts of "redundancies" built in to
try to protect against failures, but the incident on Saturday "just shows
you can't protect against the random element," Mr. Livingston said.'
This seems to me to be a remarkable design philosophy.
Richard J. Akerman
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/~rakerman/ [Richard Akerman via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 72]
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