"lessons learned from the incident"
A.K.A. : None...
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 …
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.
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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.
"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.
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.