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This happened a number of years ago.
I worked for a very large, national bank in one of the back shop areas. Generally, things ran pretty well. Unfortunately, we had a rather large issue for a few days. That issue was that the entire mainframe had crashed. For four days. This is a bank that does billions of dollars in transactions every day, so this was not a small problem.
Now, everything runs through the mainframe. The branches have software to do their jobs, but the information still has to come from the mainframe. Of course the bank had offline procedures so that the customers could still access their money, pay their loans and so on and so forth, but these procedures rely on customers actually knowing their account numbers and tellers writing them down accurately and legibly. Things actually ran smoothly for the duration of the outage. The problems started when the mainframe was finally restored and those of us in the back shop areas started reconciling all of the offline transactions.
SC #1: "But my card went through, why is my account overdrawn?" The procedure that was in place was to freeze the card system at the pre-crash balance, so every time a debit transaction went through the system thought you had the same balance. Lets say you started off with $100 in your account and then spent $75. Normally, the system updates with the new balance, but during this time, no matter how much you spent, it still thought you had the original $100. If the customer then spent another $50, it would still go through. No matter how much a customer spent, the system thought they had that same $100. When the system came back up, many customers found themselves seriously overdrawn. We were nice and waived all overdraft fees, but the customer still had to bring their account back to the positive. I can't count the number of people that said "but you shouldn't have approved the transaction!". Um, no. You still have some responsibility to know how much money you have and keep track of what's left after purchases. We paid the debits, now you have to pay us back.
SC #2: "The ATM's are down!" Okay, I do feel a little sympathy for this one. It definitely makes life a lot less convenient. The lines in the branches were long because transactions were taking longer, but we approved thousands of hours of overtime all across the country so we could staff the branches at far higher levels than is normal. The tellers were instructed to simply trust the customer and process all withdrawals within the limits of the last posted balance before the crash. Cue the overdraft whining when the system came back up. Same deal. No overdraft fees, but you have to pay us back for the money we gave you that you didn't really have.
SC #3: "But I made that deposit 2 days ago!" The law still lets us hold check deposits. Refer back to the previous paragraph for cash deposits.
SC #4: "This didn't post correctly, fix it NOW". Again, I realize that this has been a mess. The computers were down for a very long time. I and my colleagues are working 12 hour days, in shifts, around the clock to get this mess sorted out. Please be patient with us. We are as upset about it as you are, especially considering that many of us bank here as well, and we were as affected as you are. Unfortunately, unlike you, we have certain rules about our own accounts that make it even more difficult to fix ours. We can't touch our own accounts or the accounts of people we know. Since we know pretty much everybody else in our department, who's going to fix our accounts? We get it. Trust us. We're working as fast as we can. Keeping us on the phone to yell at us is keeping us away from fixing your accounts!
I'm sure there's more, but those were the ones that came to mind.
I worked for a very large, national bank in one of the back shop areas. Generally, things ran pretty well. Unfortunately, we had a rather large issue for a few days. That issue was that the entire mainframe had crashed. For four days. This is a bank that does billions of dollars in transactions every day, so this was not a small problem.
Now, everything runs through the mainframe. The branches have software to do their jobs, but the information still has to come from the mainframe. Of course the bank had offline procedures so that the customers could still access their money, pay their loans and so on and so forth, but these procedures rely on customers actually knowing their account numbers and tellers writing them down accurately and legibly. Things actually ran smoothly for the duration of the outage. The problems started when the mainframe was finally restored and those of us in the back shop areas started reconciling all of the offline transactions.
SC #1: "But my card went through, why is my account overdrawn?" The procedure that was in place was to freeze the card system at the pre-crash balance, so every time a debit transaction went through the system thought you had the same balance. Lets say you started off with $100 in your account and then spent $75. Normally, the system updates with the new balance, but during this time, no matter how much you spent, it still thought you had the original $100. If the customer then spent another $50, it would still go through. No matter how much a customer spent, the system thought they had that same $100. When the system came back up, many customers found themselves seriously overdrawn. We were nice and waived all overdraft fees, but the customer still had to bring their account back to the positive. I can't count the number of people that said "but you shouldn't have approved the transaction!". Um, no. You still have some responsibility to know how much money you have and keep track of what's left after purchases. We paid the debits, now you have to pay us back.
SC #2: "The ATM's are down!" Okay, I do feel a little sympathy for this one. It definitely makes life a lot less convenient. The lines in the branches were long because transactions were taking longer, but we approved thousands of hours of overtime all across the country so we could staff the branches at far higher levels than is normal. The tellers were instructed to simply trust the customer and process all withdrawals within the limits of the last posted balance before the crash. Cue the overdraft whining when the system came back up. Same deal. No overdraft fees, but you have to pay us back for the money we gave you that you didn't really have.
SC #3: "But I made that deposit 2 days ago!" The law still lets us hold check deposits. Refer back to the previous paragraph for cash deposits.
SC #4: "This didn't post correctly, fix it NOW". Again, I realize that this has been a mess. The computers were down for a very long time. I and my colleagues are working 12 hour days, in shifts, around the clock to get this mess sorted out. Please be patient with us. We are as upset about it as you are, especially considering that many of us bank here as well, and we were as affected as you are. Unfortunately, unlike you, we have certain rules about our own accounts that make it even more difficult to fix ours. We can't touch our own accounts or the accounts of people we know. Since we know pretty much everybody else in our department, who's going to fix our accounts? We get it. Trust us. We're working as fast as we can. Keeping us on the phone to yell at us is keeping us away from fixing your accounts!
I'm sure there's more, but those were the ones that came to mind.
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