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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

> For many banks and other financial institutions, going down for even 1 hour is a complete catastrophe.

Are you joking? It's a common trope for bank websites to go down for "scheduled maintenance". Not to mention real-world bank branches keep bizarre hours and close for random holidays like Presidents' Day and Veterans' Day.

Why do banks and credit card companies need to perform "scheduled maintenance" during which users are unable to access their information online? https://www.quora.com/Why-do-banks-and-credit-card-companies...

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Even though websites are really important, I think they mean other business critical services going down for an hour.

Imagine if all credit cards with a company failed to process transactions for an hour, or depositing/withdrawing money didn't make a change to your balance. Those types of issues are much more severe than a customer not being able to log in to the website.

You know, those kind of things already happen. Even I sometimes had issues with my credit card when paying online and usually there's another way or you could just pay an hour later.

Really? I’ve never experienced my credit or debit card not working (except in America where my Canadian debut card often will just not work)

The Canadian Revenue Agency website is down from 3am to 6am every single day for maintenance. They are also scheduled to be down for days at a time.

https://www.canada.ca/en/revenue-agency/services/e-services/...

This site is used for everything. Reviewing your taxes, reading mail and notifications you've received from the government, filing returns, making payments, etc.

That sounds amazing... as an admin, I mean. Can you imagine being allowed to have scheduled downtime every day? It does suck a bit for users, although honestly putting it at 3-6AM mitigates a lot of my concerns with that.

> although honestly putting it at 3-6AM mitigates a lot of my concerns with that.

As long as the website is only used in a single timezone, I guess it's not too bad.

Buuuut the website is used across 4.5 hours of timezones: from the west coasts GMT-8 to the east coasts GMT-3:30

Depending on which timezone 3-6AM is in, it could still be pretty reasonable.

If the financial institution performs trades on public markets, then it's a catastrophe because another actor can exploit their unavailability.

random holidays > federal holidays

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