Posted 7/26/2006 05:30:00 PM by Douglas

Forget hackers, banks are incompetent enough to fuck up their own shit.

Two of the nation's banks struggled on Tuesday to repair glitches at their Web sites that had prevented customers from fully accessing their accounts for as long as two days.

Emigrant Direct, a bank recently written up in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for offering high-paying savings accounts, saw a malfunction block customers from entering the site for long stretches over a two-day period, according to a bank employee and customers who posted complaints at an Internet message board. A note placed on Emigrantdirect.com apologized for the intermittent outages.

A bank apologizing for this?!? That's so 20th century. Anyone with a brain would just take their money from emigrant to Citibank for their 5% deal. Are they any better? They can't be worse. When you're an "online" bank and your website is down, you've ceased to be a bank. You're a common thief. But for the blatantly obvious:

Online banking is one of those service sectors where site operators have to get it right, analysts have said. A hobbled Web site can undermine consumers' confidence in a financial institution, especially because many people just now making the switch to online banking fear that hackers or a system mishap could lead to losses.

How horribly understated. When a hobbled website is the only way a consumer can access money to pay this month's mortgage, power, and grocery bill, that transcends "losses." That leads to abandonment, and rightfully so.

You had a good run, EmigrantDirect.com, but you got caught fuckin' your own dog.