How near are we to Zero Day?

On Friday, for the second month running, UK banks payment systems were down. Last month it was Barclays. This month, it is Lloyds, TSB and Nationwide, and probably more. The issue is a joint one: there is no branch anymore and online help services continually tell you that you are 19th in the queue, and you wait thirty minutes only for the line to hang up.

Houston, we have a problem.

For me, the issue is that we are so far extreme in digitalising everything that we have forgotten what happens when it goes wrong. Last Friday’s issues appears to be due to system maintenance updates. These are often planned at weekends at end of month, and so it goes. The problem is that all the apps stopped working and the same issues occurred last month. The thing is that if this is happening in multiple banks then, in my interpretation, the issues are caused by third parties in the system … as in the infrastructure providers (no names mentioned).

Why would that be? Well, if multiple banks cannot process payments, it is probably not their internal systems that caused the issue. It’s a third party. This caught national media attention and, surprisingly, I got quoted all over the place. Here’s an example from The Daily Telegraph:

Lloyds, Nationwide and Halifax among banks hit by app outage on payday

Chris Skinner, a fintech expert, told PA news agency in the wake of those outages that banks were finding it “too hard to keep up” with fast-moving technology.

He said: “I think the world is spinning so fast with technology that the challenge we have is no-one’s keeping up, particularly regulators and lawmakers.

“So the regulators and lawmakers need to have people who do better due diligence.

“I think there’s an issue here with reliability, service and resilience, and that’s the accountability of the people who are organising the structures, both from within the business, and those who look over the business in terms of the regulators.

“At the moment, I think both are probably finding it too hard to keep up.”

He added the vast array of modern tech systems needed to operate in the banking world today mean firms have “such a smorgasbord of things they have to work with”, the “competence of keeping up with these changes is really challenging every bank”.

The thing is that this is happening more and more often. A month ago, there were outages resulting in a Parliamentary (Government) inquiry.

Bank outages: Committee demands answers from banks and building societies following Barclays IT failure - Committees - UK Parliament

The Treasury Committee has written to CEOs at nine banks and building societies to request information on the scale and impact of IT failures which have affected their businesses over the last two years.

What you realise as these events occur is how the backbone of our countries, our infrastructures, our operations are all now completely dependent on electricity and technology infrastructures. Now, that does not seem to be a surprise – we have been moving this way for over a century – but what happens when the systems don’t work? We have chaos.

This is the foundation of a series on Netflix called Zero Day with Robert de Niro. Just one scene gives you an idea of where we are heading, which is when one bank locks customers out due to a cyberhack and there is chaos. Following this … well, I don’t want to spoil the show for you.

How near are we all to Zero Day, that is the question.