HSBC having web site problems

Despite the fact that its rolling in profits – brought about to some degree by squeezing out costs to the business by getting customers in interact online and thus eliminating those pesky overheads associated with branches and face to face customer service – it seems HSBC doesn't have the cash to maintain a truly seamless web service.

The bank's website has been experiencing problems this morning which it claims could take some time to resolve. Customers – including me – are having problems logging in – which the lady at the helpdesk I phoned attributed to "technical issues" but wasn't any more forthcoming on what exactly these are.

To be fair, HSBC's site has a pretty good uptime – not sure of exactly how many 9's we are talking about – but this is the first serious outage I have seen for a while. That said, with the rise of spoofing and fishing, any glitches can set the security alarm bells ringing. While no service can be truly seamless, being down for an hour or more is just unacceptable, mirroring and back-up systems should mean that service is maintained even if there are problems in one data centre. Makes you wonder where all those profits are going exactly?

Still it’s a blessing in disguise I guess as it buys me some more time before I have to confront the massive dent my holiday has undoubtedly made in my bank account.