Westpac outage. pretty p*ss poor

Westpac's 'online' banking has been offline since yesterday. Today at least they're displaying a holding/redirection page (see left). Yesterday, you just got an error. As it stands this morning its still not properly fixed.

Now this is the second time in the last three months. the last outage was because a cleaning contractor pulled out the wrong plug??? like WTF!!!

now there's certain services which you expect guaranteed uptime. Banking is definitely one of them. to have a major problem unfixed for so long is unacceptable and inexcusable for a major bank.

millions of businesses (mine included) and individuals rely on your service and you charge hefty fees for it. Stuff like a cleaner pulling out a plug should not bring down a system. At this level, their system should be designed fault tolerant and robust enough to handle such a situation. its not difficult as these systems and techniques have been around for decades, ie remote mirror sites, rollback procedures etc ... Looks like they're either not investing enough in their IT budget to ensure uptime or hiring unqualified staff or both. either way its very bad.

Now I've got anxious staff bugging me on when their pay is going in. To the folk at Westpac sure one or two days delay to someones pay is nothing, but to many workers this could be the difference in getting charged hefty credit card and loan/mortgage fees. oh hang on, who does that benefit??? you guessed it, the folk at Westpac.