While being directly affected by the outage (could not make card payments on Saturday), I have noticed that none of the communications team was clearly aware of the situation.
Here are some facts:
- the first public announcements - FB news and tweet confirming the issue have been posted at ~17.25-1735 local time, after four and a half hours
- there was a lot of wasted energy on excuses and social-media damage control, while no clear explanation and status being posted
- at 17.41 there was a FB response stating that "one unfunctional server" is the cause of the downtime; all services were down at that time
- the corporate communication director declares for press "we know about the issue, we don't know the cause of it"
- after almost 11 hours, problem is solved
Now the nice part: next day, the bank issues a press release stating that malfunction appeared after a programmed [fire suppression] test.
While accidents can happen, this looks more like "fail to plan is plan to fail" issue, as well as very bad communication.
Now the nice part: next day, the bank issues a press release stating that malfunction appeared after a programmed [fire suppression] test.
While accidents can happen, this looks more like "fail to plan is plan to fail" issue, as well as very bad communication.