Lee-Anne van Zyl has been getting very little sleep since the weekend. The CEO of FNB Online Banking and her technology team have been battling a serious problem with the bank’s database since Monday morning after a routine upgrade at the weekend went awry.
At midday on Tuesday, full service was finally restored to FNB’s online banking service.
The problems began after an update to functionality in the software that powers the online bank, Van Zyl explains. The update, which was done early on Sunday morning, showed no problems during testing. The problems only manifested themselves on Monday morning when the bank discovered the database was not able to handle heavy loads.
As a stopgap measure, the bank placed a strict limit on the number of customers who could log on to the site. By Tuesday morning, FNB has restored full service to retail customers and was offering limited access to business customers.
The problem was related to new functionality that placed heavy loads on the database. “It would hold the connection too long,” she says. The bank was not forced to buy additional hardware capacity to manage the load.
The bank says in a statement that its systems engineers worked through the night to solve the fault and to ensure it doesn’t occur again.
Other FNB channels — telephone banking, branches, ATMs and cellphone banking — were unaffected by the outage. — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral
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