Barclaycard’s Short Downtime

Posted on April 1st, 2010 by Russ. Filed under Uncategorized.

I have a Barclaycard credit card. I didn’t use it much, but they sent me a new one recently which had contactless payment support which was novel, so I started using it some more. Around the same time, about the beginning of February, I started having problems logging into their web site.

I use credit card web sites quite a bit to get at my transaction data, so I gave them a call — they were quite helpful and they said they were aware of the problem and working on it.

Today I got an email:

Dear Mr Garrett,

You were recently upgraded to a Barclaycard Cashback card.
We noticed that you recently tried to log in to mybarclaycard to manage your account online, but were unsuccessful. We’ve discovered that this is a technical issue and we’re working to resolve this, but it will take until 1st June 2010.

Yes, that’s four months’ downtime on a web site which handles my financial data.

4 Responses to “Barclaycard’s Short Downtime”

  1. Marco Barisione Says:

    Hi, I just found your blog post while googling about this. The web site has been sort of working (i.e. as badly as other banking web sites) for me in the past, but today I received that email too.
    I hope it’s a sick joke for the 1st of April, in any case I doubt I will stay with Barclays…

  2. Max Howell Says:

    2 months surely?

  3. Graham Bleach Says:

    Max: February to June is four months, but regardless of the precise number of months of downtime, I think we can agree that anything longer than a few hours is totally unacceptable.

    My mind is boggling as I try to comprehend how Barclaycard could possibly think that it’s OK to have a service unavailable for this length of time. Surely they know that their customers might be depending on it?

  4. Russ Says:

    Yes. Four months, not five, although I suspect I may have started having problems in January now I come to think of it.

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I currently work for Smarkets as Head of Tech Operations. Before that I worked at Last.fm. I also co-founded the London Hackspace.

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