Section 5.1 Managing Enterprise Architectures{0}
On September 14, 2010 JP Morgan Chase & Co. Bank suffered an online outage. This caused frustration among millions of customers because they could not access their bank accounts. The website kept on displaying “Our website is temporary unavailable”. Many people missed their payment deadlines, some probably accrued fees for over drafting because not having access to online banking to transfer money. Chase did not confirm the reason of the outage but some people have ideas of what caused it. One positive feedback that Chase did was to hop onto the social media website Twitter and post their outage on there.
Since chase is the second largest bank in the US it affected around 16.5 million people. It is true that people could have gone to a branch to take care of deposits and what not, but many people have found it more convenient to access their accounts online from their computer or via mobile device.
This article illustrated of a system failure gone wrong. Even if Chase’s system was down for maintenance, you can see how many people were affected. Chase’s outage was not timed in a friendly manner, therefore their availability to customers failed to satisfy them. The infrastructure architecture of company is extremely crucial. To have a solid infrastructure a company must have these five characteristics: flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability, and performance. Fail to not have one of this can result in customers moving their business to another company that is solid in all 5 characteristics.
What I liked about this article is that I can relate to Chase’s outage. The outage lasted for 2 days where I absolutely could not log on to my account. It was very frustrating because like many people, I heavily rely on online banking. I rarely go to a branch just because I can literally do anything through online banking. What bothered me was that Chase did a poor job of communicating the cause of the outage. No emails or alerts on their websites were given to notify customers about the outage. It was posted on Twitter but I do not have a Twitter account.
Elizabeth Fraire
Sources:
“Chase Hit By Online Outage”
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2369168,00.asp