Just a few comments, I work in a bank in Asia and I am familiar with the operations department and the processing of swift payments.
Whatever Gox says, swift payments are automated. Many millions of them are processed every day, if anyone thinks it can be done manually, they are kidding themselves. I can understand manual intervention is required from two points of view - instructions submitted with incorrect or missing data and KYC / AML requirements. About the only thing I believe from the latest Gox post is that they do not want to upset Mizuho - whatever the real problem is, they're not telling us.
I have had to deal with a surprising number of bank transfers the old fashioned way with my bank. With Paper. Depending on what gox's relationship is to their bank (why not get a bigger bank?), their own system for verifying with drawls (maybe they personally do everything by hand) and depending on how the bank wants to handle things for them- (maybe they deliberately limit gox) it might not be as automated as you think.
And one more thing, in my professional life I have seen many situations where banking processes get into trouble due to spikes in volume, either caused by shortages in manpower, network bandwidth, software or hardware limitations. What I have never seen is a decision to shut things down for 2 weeks. Any financial institution would first of all monitor volumes, and would know in advance when they are approaching capacity. They would then plan accordingly, in advance and develop an alternative. This takes time. Months, at least. Sure, you can be surprised by volumes. They can go up faster than expected. In that case, the bank would take one of two decisions, based on internal priorities and funds available to fix the problem. Option 1 is they don't spend any additional money - the current process continues, it struggles, there are delays, but at the same time the alternative system is developed. Once that is done and tested, they flick the switch, usually over a week-end or another point of low volume, minimizing downtime. Option B is similar, except with more money thrown at the problem. You hire more people to help the struggling process, and spend more money to accelerate the development of an alternative. The switch-over is the same, and would never result in a downtime of more than 12-24 hours, and even those, over a week-end.
Also, nobody in the financial industry is moronic enough not to understand the impact of an announcement that you are stopping USD withdrawals, especially when you do not fully disclose the reason. They should have done better in the first place, coming 24 hours later to appease the masses is just not good enough.
Disclosure: I have an account with Mt.Gox and have used them in the past, but have no balance of either BTC or fiat.
