NEW YORK — Bank of America says its online banking website crashed Friday, leaving customers unable to access their accounts.
From late morning Friday, customers trying to log on saw a message that said the site was ‘‘temporarily unavailable.’’
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NEW YORK — Bank of America says its online banking website crashed Friday, leaving customers unable to access their accounts.
From late morning Friday, customers trying to log on saw a message that said the site was ‘‘temporarily unavailable.’’
Comments
Perhaps being available 24/7 as BOA web pages have indicated in the past is just a goal not a committment.
Companies with smart CEO's and management teams realize that "5 Nines" availability (99.999% uptime or 5 minutes of downtime per year) is far less expensive and customer satisfying than a big outage like the one on Friday. "3 Nines" or 99.9% means about 525 minutes of downtime per year - over 8 hours.
Obviously, customers were exasperated, especially those using the bank for '1st of the month' payments, etc.
The big telco like AT&T routinely ran 6 nines - less than 5 seconds - so it's not technically difficult.
If you want to avoid dealing with a bank which is headquarted in North Carolina, try one of the good local credit unions. Their CEO's live here in MA and don't spend customer money on jet planes.
Given that BoA (of which I am a customer) and other banks have aggressively pushed use of on-line banking, this story is a bit ironic. At a minimum, BoA should provide some detail on the problem. Also, how will it help customers who could not make bill payments and such?