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.
Following our post RBS computer glitch- a disaster waiting to happen that a bungled update to CA-7 batch processing software used by RBS lay behind the collapse, further details have emerged.
According to a source 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. It was this error which made the task of restoring services so prolonged:
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.
CA Technologies – the makers of the CA-7 software at the heart of the snarl-up – are helping RBS to fix the disaster that has affected 16.9 million UK bank accounts.
The batch scheduling tool CA-7 is widely used and generally considered to be very reliable, so it appears that the error – that meant millions of accounts have registered incorrect balances for many days – sprang from the oversight of the technology at RBS.