back to article Bank of England: What's all this then, CHAPS? Review to get a grip on IT cockup

The Bank of England has opened an investigation into the IT failure of its bank-to-bank payment processing system, which handles £277bn a day. Last month the bank's Clearing House Automated Payments System (CHAPS) was temporarily suspended. This was due to "technical issue related to some routine maintenance" on its Real Time …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    FAIL

    "lessons learned from the incident"

    A.K.A. : None...

    1. Mark 65

      Re: "lessons learned from the incident"

      The lessons learned will be that some highly paid consultants need to come in to complete an incredibly expensive project of work that will achieve little other than fill their pockets.

  2. Yugguy

    Dave

    Dave clicked restart instead of logoff.

    It blue-screened on the way back up.

    Then they realised they really should have sorted those failed backups out.,

  3. MustyMusgrave
    Devil

    LoL

    A technical issue - good way of saying we suddenly realised CHAPS is broken and we had hackers running rampant looking at finacial transactions.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I'd not of liked to be in the team supporting that...

  5. Khaptain Silver badge

    Secret Cobol programmer was ill

    The plethora of sub-routines, sub-processes, ie : the means by which the banks can filter money of into hidden unspecified accounts, was so complex that the temp outsourced code monkey unintentionally made a minor filtering mistake and they were unable to recover the lost yachting funds for the month.

    1. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Deloitte?

    It is like asking the wolf why the sheep died

    1. Mark 65

      Re: Deloitte?

      and then perhaps giving him the contract to guard the rest of the flock?

  7. LucreLout

    CHAPS is a 30-year-old system

    I'll take a wild guess that some or all of the system has been outsourced or offshored, and that ultimately this is the cause of the outage. In the unlikely event it isn't that, then it's probably still running on whatever hardware it was originally installed on, because nobody really understands it anymore, and something finally failed.

    Here's a clue corporates - comuters and programs are not like buildings. You can't use them until they fall apart, you can only use them for as long as skills and experience are available in the market.

    1. dkjd

      As CHAPS is nowadays based on SWIFTs Y-COPY using MT103 messages, I don't think the "system" is 30 years old. Nice that everything in CHAPS goes through the BofE nowadays, that must make things simpler and more reliable than the bad old de-centralised days?

      1. SharkNose

        The messaging infrastructure is SWIFT based but the core settlement processing is not...last I heard it ran on a pair of former Tandem NonStop boxes, very reliably on the whole it has to be said.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Because it runs on equipment that used to be at...

    Bletchley Park? The guy who last programmed it is long dead the past 29 years? That they were going to replace it with an AS400 and Cobol but that was new technology and they didn't feel comfortable with it?

  9. channel extended

    Legacy Software?

    Maybe the only guy who understood the system was laid off?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Legacy Software?

      "Maybe the only guy who understood the system was laid off?"

      When this news first came about, a relatively simple bit of searching publically accessible LinkedIn profiles revealed the name of a man that used to be in charge of the NonStop infrastructure at the BoE, which underpins the application in question here.

      Used to, because he left just over a year ago, for a different job in a different part of the country, still in the financial sector, still on NonStop. Ain't privacy wonderful.

      I haven't been able to find out whether the BoE systems involved are still in the UK. I guess Rick knows.

      I'm hoping a Parliamentary inquiry might reveal that detail if it hasn't emerged beforehand.

  10. Glen 1
    Joke

    *ahem*

    Bitcoin rulez, Fiat droolz

    see icon ->

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Old skool

    Lovely people in IT there. So many stuck in a time-warp though. I'd say a decade in raw tech and two decades in terms of attitude. Wading through treacle to get things done. So not a "banking" ethos in there. But lovely people nonetheless.

  12. Richard 34

    It's all about the lunch

    I was a member of the GUIDE PL/I working party about (cough) years ago. We'd have a presentation from a member about some interesting way his/her company was using the language, or we would hear about new features being put into the language or the library.

    Member organizations would take turns to host the meetings. BoE was a member and BoE meetings, sadly before my time, were said to be legendary for the quality of the lunch they would lay on.

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