My internet bank, Cahoot,has been inaccessible for two days - and counting.
How can something as basic as a power cut completely knock out an internet bank - and call centre - for two days? Don’t banks have power back ups? With everything that’s going wrong for banks at the moment, Santander could at least have paid their electricity bill.
Seriously, I would have thought major financial institutions would have ways of protecting themselves from something as straightfoward as a power cut. Is this normal?
Sorry: that’s a bummer. I hope the bank’s definition of “shortly” is much faster than the normal experience with the word “shortly.”
Our call center has a huge generator. If the electricity goes out, we notice… for about 5 seconds. Then the generator kicks in. For a bank not to have a redundant call center or a back up plan is, IMHO, irresponsible.
Cripes. After the big blackout in '03, the construction crews moved in at the place where I work and deposited an enormous diesel genset that can keep the data centre up and running as long as it has fuel. I have a friend that works on mainframes and he tells me that banks are orders of magnitude more reliable: if they get less than 99.95% uptime on their main servers, that’s a major scandal. And their systems are designed so that parts can be swapped out for preventative maintenance without interrupting service.
What kind of outfit names a bank cahoot anyways?
I think - at least, I hope - what they had in mind was more the meaning involving just a straight partnership (as in: in cahoots).
I don’t think I’ve ever heard ‘in cahoots’ used without the implication that the partnership is shady.
Merriam-Webster doesn’t mention anything other than a vanilla partnership.