If I were a customer, I'd use this as a sign that this company is not technically competent enough to manage my money.
Source: https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bece...
Pro tip: if you’re ever in that situation, demand the bank produce the deed proving ownership to a court of law.
I have a 30 year mortgage, but every 5 years I have to "renew" it. At that time, I have to renegotiate the rate for the next 5 years. As part of this negotiation, I can just switch banks if I want. Or to a private lender. Or to anyone really.
It seems weird to me that you are beholden to an entity you've never signed any contract with.
Credit unions usually have good offers.
Ideally you’re not buying a home that you can’t afford if rates go up too much.
Typically the Bank of Canada sets their prime rate, some time later the big banks set their own prime rates based on that, then the mortgage rates are set based on that. The Bank of Canada prime rate only moves by .25% or .5% at a time.
If you have a variable rate mortgage and the rates change, they will be immediately reflected your mortgage. This isn't as bad as it sounds - your payment will stay the same, the rate change just affects how much goes to interest vs principal. The mortgage documents will include the 'trigger rate' which is how high interest rates need to get before your payments no longer cover the interest. This is the point where you're in trouble.
For some variable rate loans, like an auto loan, an increasing rate just means that the term of the loan gets longer or shorter.
As always, ask questions. The bank, in Canada at least, doesn't really want you to default on the loan. Ask about the trigger rate, ask what happens if it gets hit, ask what happens if rates go up but don't hit the trigger rate, ask about lump sum payments.
Story time: several years ago I took out a 10 year fixed rate of 2.99%. My thinking was that since the base rate couldn't really go down any further, I was locking in a good rate.
As it's turned out, so far I could have had a series of 2 year fixed at around 2%, so this was potentially the wrong move, although the maximum downside was limited.
My parents on the other hand took out a 12.99% fix in the early 90's, which turned out to be incredibly unlucky given the unprecedented low inflation of the nineties and noughties.
I would expect if WF decided your first loan met their purchasing criteria, your refinance would get the same treatment.
I'm not in the US, though.
I mean truthfully when do you get to test your redundancy against a true disaster. It was a mess. WF is 20 companies rolled into one so the fact the disparate systems from 10 different banks works at all is kind of a miracle.
You're pretty much damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you touch things that are working you could break them. If you don't touch things you never know what'll happen and you get fewer opportunities to learn. Move your servers around geographically and you might improve the odds that anything is working by reducing the odds that everything is working.
I don't think we're quite to a place yet where having servers down can be characterized as a non-event. Even if the customer can't see a behavioral difference, business units still tend to get quite anxious, and sometimes their theatrics put the whole process in jeopardy (not unlike trying to rescue a drowning man). It just hasn't been normalized yet.
If a customer can't pay a fine - can't use their bank account - they go to jail. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/bank-acc...
These are pretty different outcomes.
Would you honestly want to go to a bank and say "if we unplug this, we can find out what fails."
I've worked for banks here in Australia. Everything is 30+ years old. It's a shambles.
I’m serious.
Netflix designed their stuff from the ground up to fail over. Large monolith corporations who've inherited systems from other companies they've bought or merged with have challenges you won't see many places that have benefited from the 30 years of lessons that were taught at these companies.
No, it can't. Any loss of customer-facing functionality is a critical outage ("World Problem" in company terminology). There are a relatively small number of customers, but the terminal is critical to the operations of those who buy it. The terminal going down for eight hours would be a world-wide headline in the financial press.
A Tier 1 test that simulates loss of a datacenter takes a cluster one DC virtually offline. This puts an entire subset of services offline in that DC entirely. The test is coordinated with the teams who own the services to ensure their services fail over correctly. Any service disruption during the failover is a test failure. If it passes, the customers don't even know it happened. The goal is to be able to lose an entire DC and have the terminal customers not realize it until they hear about it on the news.
Do you know what Bloomberg does? It powers equities trading markets around the world, 24/7. It isn't just news.
Chaos engineering and AWS weren't real things when they started building the company. And the system they have now doesn't resemble much of it was once.
Truth of the matter is they invested more in their infrastructure, but that's because their business plan required them to grow on the back of technological advances. Banks, it's seems, do not. Or maybe they do, and the some of these start up banks will usurp them.
But I’m guessing wellsfargo just doesn’t have a reason to care.
You can bail out of a test at the first sign of trouble. When a real outage hits, there’s no telling how long it will take to recover.
Tangentially related, I highly recommend the movie "Out of the Clear Blue Sky." Cantor Fitzgerald was a bond trading firm at the top of one of the twin towers and lost every employee who was in the office on 9/11. Incredibly, despite losing the majority of their employees and despite losing almost all of their trading infrastructure, they managed to resume operations in time for the bond market's reopening 48 hours later.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/every-wells-fargo-consumer-sc...
You can't really roll back say 10 minutes of transactions, so are you maintaining 2 parallel systems? How do you keep them perfectly in sync?
This isn't my area of expertise by a long shot, but it occurs to me this is probably hard, especially when your codebase started in the 60s, and has been accreting ever since.
The backup doesn’t need to be in the same exact state as the primary (it’s not meant to service requests), it just needs to have a persistent log of what changes were applied so that it can roll forward when needed.
Most relational DBs do something like this for their DR product offering. Oracle has Active Data Guard. DB2 has HADR.
Example of high-level guidelines (Singapore): http://www.mas.gov.sg/~/media/resource/legislation_guideline...
I think that in Switzerland all major banks test their disaster-readiness (by switching everything to their secondary datacenters & working locations) of all critical applications/software-layers and employees at least once every 3 years - reaction/recovery times depend on the criticality of the service provided by the person/application.
And if anyone ever figures out that isn't the way it is, and that the numbers are not representative of anything of substance? If nations refuse to honor the claimed 'transfers' done through these rickety electronic systems? It would make for an interesting few days.
(Even if you can just put anything in the email form)
And then starting around 2010 but rapidly accelerating around 2014, everything about them went to shit.
The best explanation I can think of is that John Stumpf is a slash & burn sociopath, juicing the numbers so he can get his 473x-the-median-worker paycheck while ruining the company. He wouldn't be alone in the financial world, but it's a shame that a 150+ year old institution can so rapidly go down the toilet.
Except then PayPal made a few more attempts for god knows why and each time Wells Fargo kicked an NSF fee our way.
Now, PayPal shouldn’t have repeatedly attempted a rejected charge. But, Wells Fargo shouldn’t have allowed those attempts. They just couldn’t help themselves to that $35 NSF fee though.
We fought it to no avail. With all the NSF fees and interest (and fees they added to fees while we fought it), what started as a $300 transaction ultimately cost us over $1200.
Wells Fargo is now and was in 2009/2010 a criminal enterprise.
All the crazy sales numbers and bogus account shenanigans were going on back in 2003/2004 when I worked there. I ratted out more than one professional banker to branch managers and up over that crap. A fun one was the home equity lines people would open without customer knowledge and link up to overdraft protection. The customer would never owe, nor know, anything until one day an overdraft hit their equity line, and then they got notified of late payments.. I don't miss working for a Bank.
The WF business is clearly set up to confuse and exploit consumers. My credit union websites have always helped me do what I want and need with my money. This includes the tiny local credit union in Idaho.
Also, failover is hard. Few companies outside of a few larger Internetz companies can really do it well.
Im employed by WF and even Im a little bewildered by the fact there doesn't seem to be any redundancy implemented somewhere.
Big companies tend to defer risk. Managers and project leads want to start new projects rather than upgrade existing infrastructure. Combine these forces and sometimes you get a catastrophe.
Are you sure you're not one?
After all their logo is that of a stage coach aka the wild Wild West(robbers, thieves, etc). They do not hide who they really are.
Yes. One place I worked (not a tech company, but with tons of electronics), when the fire alarms went off we had xx seconds (I don't remember the number) to get out of the building before something called Intergen was vented into the room to somehow suck all of the oxygen out, and if we were still inside we'd be dead.
It must be pretty serious stuff, because we'd have evacuation drills twice a year.
I think the concern likely comes from:
-Folks that are of poor cardiac function are going to be evacuating, meaning increased cardiac demand under stress, while being somewhat oxygen-starved. This could tip some folks into an acute episode that otherwise wouldn't.
-Folks that are of poor oxygen function, who are borderline hypoxemic to begin with. Think folks with chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder: about 5% of your employees aged 55-65 will have it.
You won't suddenly kill a building full of people. I'm guessing the evacuation rush is to make sure they're not liable for unnecessarily sending a couple to the hospital.
To put that in perspective, that's like being sent to the top of Pikes Peak (4.3km / 14,000') in seconds. Pilots flying that high in unpressurized aircraft are required to have oxygen masks. Most people will develop altitude sickness when rapidly subjected to that.
When you consider the potential for stress or panic in this kind of scenario, hypoxia emerges as a very real threat even for the young and healthy.
That's an important caveat, given how the danger was apparently greatly exaggerated.
If you've been told that the system will
> somehow suck all of the oxygen out, and if we were still inside we'd be dead
then what are you going to do in a real fire situation, when you're not in imminent danger but your escape route is blocked by flames? Better to brave the fire (or jump out a window) than submit to death by suffocation...
From what I understand, using water/dry pipe isn't unheard of. Some prefer it over Halon - https://blog.equinix.com/blog/2014/03/26/we-must-protect-thi... .
Did not know Halon could destroy circuit cards. Apparently it also damages the Ozone.
> VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places.
Suffice to say... yes. There are fire suppression systems that will pull oxygen out of the room. People are advised to leave the room before the fire suppression system takes effect.
Wonder if it was the switchgear that failed. Amazon uses custom firmware in its switchgears because this happens so often (Superbowl 2013 etc.)
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2013/02/the-power-failure-...
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/04/at-scale-rare-even...
https://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2017/12/when-you-cant-affo...
https://np.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ao4g2y/wells_fargo...