Back in August, Barclays Bank, Europe's sixth largest bank by market value, suffered a power outage that kept its customers from accessing the bank's ATM machines or their bank accounts. Barclays said that the outage lasted twenty minutes, although its impact was felt for most of the day. Since the outage occurred on a Saturday afternoon, it caused anger among its customers who were out shopping.
Well, this past Saturday afternoon around 1415 BST, Barclays' Barclaycard electronic fund transfer (EFT) system suffered a "technical issue" which caused a 20 - 45 minute outage, the London Telegraph and others reported. This time, stores using the Barclaycard EFT system couldn't process customer credit or debit cards, or their ATM transactions.
The stores reportedly affected were Sainsbury's, Waitrose, Morrisons, B&Q, Homebase and Argos. All 872 Sainsbury's stores were affected.
According to this story in TechWorld, Barclaycard processes electronic payments for 85,000 UK retail outlets.
Barclay's apologized and said an investigation into what happened has been launched. A complaint from the August outage was the bank's poor risk communication about what happened and why. Maybe Barclays will be more forthcoming this time.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.