One customer tweeted that he had to leave his watch in a restaurant as collateral because he was unable to pay. Another that they had to walk out of the supermarket because their card was declined - and it did not work at a cash machine.
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Also affected First Direct.
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Another reminder to always avoid keeping all access to money (debit and credit cards) dependant on one single bank, or even one card network.
You are very unlikely to be left high and dry if you have access to both Visa and Mastercard from at least two completely unconnected banks. It could still happen, but at least you wouldn’t be dependant on a single point of failure.
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The first customer was lying or misinformed. There’s no requirement to leave collateral. He should have called the police and had the restaurant owner informed of that.
It sounded like he just left it as a sign of good faith, not because he was forced to.
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The obvious takeaway from this is the importance of having with more than one payment option (and the bewildering number of folk who have only one 
).
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Exactly, yes!
Precisely. In this day and age. R-
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In this day and age banks should have redundant systems, honestly. BT has some Cloud options AFAIK that lets you spread load across multiple clouds (Amazon, Azure, Alibaba)
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They should, and to an extent they probably do, but even your redundancy can go wrong!
Things like errors in failover software, DNS outages (making even backup servers unreachable) and physical catastrophic datacentre failure, along with incidents that hit all your infrastructure or require it to be taken offline - like emergency responses to security issues - can always still occur.
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I’m aware but the reality is most people only have a single account, few spread across. There will be outages and businesses should be educated on how to deal with them
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A significant number of people in the UK do now have two or more current accounts, I’d say, but you are right that the majority only have one.
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Completely agree with everything said.
And that type of redundancy costs money and what matters most is the bottom line
Working OK for me at the moment but it’s the first time I’ve tried since early this morning.
