Originally Posted by corporate-wage-slave

It's not at all unusual, unfortunately. It must be so annoying for the staff when it happens since no-one with any self respect would want to go to work to twiddle thumbs. Usually a systems outage of this sort is of short duration, an hour or so and it seems to happen every month or so. This outage appears to have rumbled on for longer. The IT architecture behind this is elaborate, to say the least, and it's seemingly too easy to bring the edifice crashing down. BA is investing in this area, but progress is very slow. There isn't anything much that a customer can do, unless the online tools can be jollied into action, so it is best to just leave it for a few hours or the next day.