back to article Sage Pay prevents punters blowing Xmas wad

Sage Pay has apologised for a four hour outage yesterday that left online merchants with no way to process payments for Christmas orders. Simon Black, managing director of Sage Pay, said: "I deeply regret the impact that we've had on your business, at what is the worst possible time for our systems to fail." The length of the …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Black Helicopters

    Not surprised

    Spent 10 years working for Sage (Well I say working, attending Sage is more truthful), the whole design ethos isn't on quality at all. I remember when the technicians used to come in for Saturday morning overtime to do product bug testing. It wasn't particularly structured. Basically we would just go through the stuff customers do (This worked well as support bods have seen pretty much every stupid thing a customer would try). R&D didn't like this very much as we caught a load of bugs early so they decided to bring in a "professional testing team", made up of bods off the street. Much fanfare from R&D, our new product launched with X% less bugs than normal. There were actually more bugs, just that the new muppets didn't know what to look for.

    As for T'interweb stuff Sage really isn't best placed to operate in that marketplace. They don't tend to like spending money on fully resiliant services

    Anonymous coward cos they like to sue!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    This sure sounds like the old Peachtree crew?

    Looks like SOS, DD at Sage? You'd a thunk they'd have ditched the clowns who use to work at Peachtree that provided so many defective products?

  3. Parax
    FAIL

    More outages than the Austrailian cricket team...

    (been waiting to post that all day!)

    Dear Simon, don't you ever get tired of saying sorry?

  4. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    unknown?

    If you have two servers, and one of them is down, does failing over to that server mean that your failover procedures are rather incomplete?

  5. Paul 87

    It's been like this

    ...ever since they switched from Protx to Sagepay, the change of name bought with it failure after failure after failure. Only one you can definately say wasn't their fault, and that was the fire at the Paddington telephone exchange, the rest seems to be deep mismanagement and failure to adaquately test their unwanted "improvements" to the system.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Unhappy

      Explanation on the blog.

      There's wisdom in a lot of old proverbs, but sagepay does NOT agree:

      http://sagepay.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/if-it-aint-broke/

      And that says more about the lack of wisdom in the old sage.

      I truely wish Sagepay had not bought out Protx it just worked.

  6. wheelybird
    Thumb Down

    A failure a day

    We use sagpay on our website. I used to screen-scrape Sage's status page for our alerting system until they got wise to that and made it restricted access (they don't like people knowing that their systems are knackered).

    After that I started scraping their RSS feed, but that didn't work very well because they used to only update that once they'd (temporarily) fixed their problems, with a 'all OK' message.

    However, since their last 'upgrade', they've started being more honest on their RSS feed, and actually reporting when there are problems. The down-side to this is that there have been very few days in the last month when that alert hasn't been fired because of their poor systems.

    So I've had to turn of alerting for their system.

    I suspect the Windows XP laptop they run their system on is become a bit old an knackered now.

    1. Bah Humbug

      title

      Think the problem is that they upgraded that XP laptop to Vista...

  7. CD001

    SNAFU

    Basically - it was all working quite well for a week or so - it's kind of comforting to see things return to normal... despite the fact that normal is shonkier than a sack full of shonky in a Brummie's backpack.

    Still - at least it was "out of hours" so didn't affect MOTO transactions for us - just a few thousand pounds worth of web orders so that's OK then *sighs*

  8. walders
    FAIL

    Sage Pay are inherently flawed

    Where I work Sage Pay had a bug which regularly and without warning double charged our customers for random payments made. No errors were reported and when we picked it up with them some weeks ago they were no help whatsoever, and despite leaving 100s of our customers out of pocket have stubbornly refused to pay out compensation to them where it is due. This situation still rolls on today.

    Awful system, awful company, awful people

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