[RndTbl] TD network failure

Gilbert E. Detillieux gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca
Mon Oct 29 10:44:09 CST 2001


According to author:
> Does anyone have any specifics as to why the 
> Toronto Dominion Bank had that major failure
> this Saturday, October 27 ?  All I hear in the
> media is that it was some kind of
> 'hardware' failure. Nothing specific said.

I'm in the same boat.  I listened to various news reports on Saturday night,
but they just referred vaguely to a "computer glitch" or a "computer bug",
without getting into any details.

> I'd really like to know what happened to
> crash their whole system. I thought the banks
> had 'bullet-proof' networks what with all those
> billions of dollars they have to spend.

This had to be a major failure too, to last the whole day, and affect all
electronic access to TD-CT accounts, from ATM's, Interac payments, Internet
banking (via the web), and most likely phone banking as well.  I would
suspect it was not a network problem, per se, but rather a failure of their
account database, for it to affect all modes of account access like that.

This was a major pain for me, since Saturdays are when I do most of my
banking transactions.  I couldn't pay bills via the web, couldn't use my
debit card at Superstore (which doesn't take the credit cards I have, and I
had almost no cash on hand), and couldn't get any cash out of my main TD
account.  Good thing I still had a mostly-dormant Bank of Montreal account
with some money in it, so I was able to get cash that way.  (And prior to
Saturday, I was seriously thinking of closing that account.)

Their web site was working again on Sunday, but they hadn't posted any news
about the previous day's problems.

This morning, I went to use my TD card via Interac again, and it failed
the first time.  (I was thinking "Oh no! Not again...")  Fortunately, it
worked on the second try.  I suspect their systems are swamped today, as
people try to get caught up.  The store clerks didn't seem too pleased with
TD either, saying "Oh, they're always going down!"

Strange, because in my 10 years of dealing with them, this is the first such
failure I can recall.

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail:	<gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Computer Science	Web:	http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/
University of Manitoba		Phone:	(204)474-8161
Winnipeg, MB, CANADA  R3T 2N2	Fax:	(204)474-7609



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