August 2019 was a bad month when it came to financial services outages, with both consumers and investors faced with banking glitches that made them unable to access their accounts. Let’s take a look at the anomalies that made headlines over the last 30 days.
Traders Stymied by London Stock Exchange Outage
August 16, 2019 | London, UK
Traders hoping to make a profit by selling FTSE 100 and FTSE 250 stocks were thwarted by an outage that delayed the opening of these indexes by roughly 40 minutes. Major banking companies such as HSBC and Barclays were affected by this issue, which is the second technical glitch in the exchange this summer.
Vanguard Glitch Shows Phantom Market Crash
August 13, 2019 | USA
Stock traders also received a scare when a broken network component caused Vanguard index funds to stop communicating with the NYSE. Due to the outage, a large number of these funds appeared to lose up to 60% of their value – making investors extremely nervous.
Plusnet Downtime Sparks Wave of User Complaints
August 13, 2019 | UK
Following a Plusnet outage that made users unable to make or receive calls, the UK telecom has now earned the dubious distinction of possessing the largest number of customer complaints among British service providers.
Commonwealth Bank Outage Prevents Withdrawals
August 12, 2019 | Australia
Australian customers were outraged due to a bank outage that left them unable to make payments or access their accounts. Widespread reports showed consumers stranded at restaurants, in grocery checkout lines, and unable to purchase transport as the outage continued.
Gamers Frustrated by PSN, Xbox Live Outages
August 7-8, 2019 | Global
There are few things worse than an angry gamer. Players across the world worked up a storm on social media as outages affected both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. While Playstation gamers found themselves unable to make matchups in online games, some Xbox players found themselves unable to play at all.
UK Bank Outages Lock Customers Out of Accounts
August 7, 2019 | UK
Lloyd’s Banking Group, a conglomeration with nearly 30 million users across the United Kingdom, confirmed an outage that affected 67 percent of its customers. Although the outage only lasted a matter of minutes, a large portion of their customers complained about being unable to perform online banking or mobile shopping for hours following the event.
Chase Bank Glitch Affects Consumers Nationwide
July 31, 2019 | Illinois, US
A server outage affected the ability of bank tellers to communicate with the Chase central bank, preventing the organization from processing high-value transactions in the Chicago area.
Verizon Failure Knocks Out Cell Service for Midwest Customers
July 30, 2019 | Iowa, US
A major Verizon outage took down cellphone service for customers from Iowa to Illinois. The outage was traced to a hardware issue that took engineers several hours to resolve. In the meantime, customers were forced to make calls over Wifi, as opposed to 3G or 4G networks.
Capital One Attacker Achieves Record-Setting Breach
July 30, 2019 | US
An attacker took advantage of a misconfigured AWS account at Capital One in order to gather social security numbers, bank account numbers, and other information from an estimated 100 million users. Although the breach was widespread, it’s believed that the attacker was unable to distribute the stolen information before her arrest.
Slack Outage Mutes Chats
July 29, 2019 | Global
Business productivity briefly dipped when Slack reported a global outage. Over two thousand users took to social media to report that they were unable to send chats, forcing them to email each other the old-fashioned way. The downtime lasted approximately 40 minutes.
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This was a worrying month – especially if you were a Vanguard customer! A pricing glitch is one thing, but a stock-price glitch is quite another. Keep your customers calm by integrating AI anomaly detection so you can find and fix glitches before they make headlines.
Written by Anodot
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