Barclays servers crash ... 15 millions of Customers affected : not Bitcoin.

[Meuh6879]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-25/barclays-server-crash-leaves-customers-unble-withdraw-cash-use-debit-cards

It is not yet known how many of Barclays' 15 million card customers have been affected by the problems. In a tweet, the bank said: "We're still experiencing issues affecting Barclays Debit Card and ATM transactions. Our teams are working to get this restored."

Barclays added: "Technical issues are affecting some digital services. We're investigating this and apologise for any inconvenience."

This is the latest in a series of technical "glitches" to hit the bank recently. Today's problems come months after thousands of Barclays customers in the north of the UK had payments wrongly taken from their accounts.

Last October, Barclays said customers were refunded after they had duplicate debit card payments taken.

An amusing, if accurate comment following the news, highlights just how "safe" one's cash held in the bank is these days.

In my country, duplicate payments can bee seen every month !!! ...

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[Carlton Banks]

I have never heard of Barclays, are they a major card issuer in the UK (Visa)or a major bank (Chase)?

Both. Mostly in Europe, Africa and East Asia.

[Meuh6879]

[andrewbadr]

Maybe they should look into investing more R&D into the blockchain.

[davis196]

Maybe they should look into investing more R&D into the blockchain.

There are some rumors about a heavy attack over the bitcoin network and we are still standing.
The banks are so much more vulnerable than the blockchain,maybe that`s why some banks want to adopt the blockchain.

[HCP]

One bank has a service issue and it's customers are inconvenienced... Doesn't really affect anyone outside of the 15million Barclay's customers.

Now, playing devils advocate here... what about the issues of late with the enormous amount of unconfirmed transactions floating around in the mempool?

Sure, you can pay "massive" fees to "try" and prioritise your transaction^[1], but even that may not work if you put your transaction in with a "decent" fee at say 40K transactions... and suddenly there are 80K transactions in the pool 10 minutes later before a block is mined!

Bitcoin and "The Blockchain"™ just have a different set of issues from more traditional forms of value store/transfer... it is far from the utopia that some of the cryptoevangelists would have you believe.


[1]: Relative compared to the fees we have had to pay historically... and let's face it... it is still just a gamble... there is no obligation for the miners to include any given transaction into a block.

[avikz]

Maybe they should look into investing more R&D into the blockchain.

There are some rumors about a heavy attack over the bitcoin network and we are still standing.
The banks are so much more vulnerable than the blockchain,maybe that`s why some banks want to adopt the blockchain.

Yes, there was a news about attack on bitcoin network and some people were saying that the transaction were not getting confirmed due to that. However, I doubt there was an attack of any sort. The confirmation was getting delayed due to the congestion of transactions and unavailability of active nodes. But everything has come back on track now and the number of unconfirmed transactions has also reduced a lot.

Bank server are always vulnerable to attacks. Last year, the central bank of Bangladesh had lost a lot of money which they recovered later. Barclay's servers are no exception. However, these are temporary and will not have long lasting effect on customers hopefully.   

[Amph]

one good thing about bitcoin despite the transaction and delay issue, is that bitcoin will never crash, that's the beauty of decentralization

hi don't know how strong is the visa and master circuit but did it crash at least one time in all those years?

[paul gatt]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-25/barclays-server-crash-leaves-customers-unble-withdraw-cash-use-debit-cards

It is not yet known how many of Barclays' 15 million card customers have been affected by the problems. In a tweet, the bank said: "We're still experiencing issues affecting Barclays Debit Card and ATM transactions. Our teams are working to get this restored."

Barclays added: "Technical issues are affecting some digital services. We're investigating this and apologise for any inconvenience."

This is the latest in a series of technical "glitches" to hit the bank recently. Today's problems come months after thousands of Barclays customers in the north of the UK had payments wrongly taken from their accounts.

Last October, Barclays said customers were refunded after they had duplicate debit card payments taken.

An amusing, if accurate comment following the news, highlights just how "safe" one's cash held in the bank is these days.

In my country, duplicate payments can bee seen every month !!! ...

I never heard anything about it, however, I understand the problem you say, it is the duplication of payments. I think the cause of it is due to their technical qualifications, they need a technical science grow stronger to make sure things do not get any error. This trouble if not resolved soon, the business will certainly collapse, which is not too distant future, and maybe it happened

[HCP]

Yes, there was a news about attack on bitcoin network and some people were saying that the transaction were not getting confirmed due to that. However, I doubt there was an attack of any sort. The confirmation was getting delayed due to the congestion of transactions and unavailability of active nodes. But everything has come back on track now and the number of unconfirmed transactions has also reduced a lot.

Not sure what the lack of active nodes has to do with it? It was simply a case of incoming transactions being generated faster than the miners could put them into blocks... which is partly related to the whole blocksize issue... imagine if we could store up to twice as many transactions in a single block! *cough*SegWit*cough*

The "attack" part of it comes from the theory that "bad people"™ were generating thousands upon thousands of transactions and purposely flooding the mempool. Why someone would want to do this, is the topic for a different discussion.

[pedrog]

Bitcoin users are already affected by network congested and cannot move their coins.

It always pains me seeing how digital infrastructure is so much neglected and not just in terms of security but also in reliability even by big companies which depend on this kind of infrastructure, and eventually things broke.

[Xester]

Technical error always occurred to any companies it may be due to technology or human error. This system malfunction happens once in a while and even bitcoin related sites encounters those problem also. The problem with Barclay is that it involves huge amount and a lot of clients affected. This is not a minor error but a major problem that the company must face.