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English: RBS logo, with writing in gaelic scottish, Portree Bank, Isle of skye Français : enseigne de la banque RBS de Portree sur l’île de Skye, Bank of Scotland est écrit en gaélique écossais (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
‘Inexperienced’ RBS tech operative’s blunder led to banking meltdown
By Anna Leach • Get more from this author
Posted in Financial News, 26th June 2012 11:56 GMT
Exclusive A serious error committed by an “inexperienced operative” caused the IT meltdown which crippled the RBS banks last week, a source familiar with the matter has told The Register. Job adverts show that at least some of the team responsible for the blunder were recruited earlier this year in India following IT job cuts at RBS in the UK.
Following our revelation yesterday that a bungled update to CA-7 batch processing software used by RBS lay behind the collapse, further details have emerged. According to a Registersource who worked at RBS for several years, an inexperienced operative made a major error while performing the relatively routine task of backing out of an upgrade to the CA-7 tool. It is normal to find that a software update has caused a problem; IT staff expect to back out in such cases.
But in the process of backing out a major blunder was committed, according to our source. It was this error which made the task of restoring services so prolonged:
When they did the back-out, a major error was made. An inexperienced person cleared the whole queue … they erased all the scheduling.
That created a large backlog as all the wiped information had to be re-inputted to the system and reprocessed. A complicated legacy mainframe system at RBS and a team inexperienced in its quirks made the problem harder to fix, our source adds.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/26/rbs_natwest_ca_technologies_outsourcing/
