Imagine for instance if Hackernews was only open from 12pm to 11pm on weekdays and until 1 AM on weeekends.
Also, you cannot make people feel a sense of community with you by annoying them. Annoying someone will make them dislike you.
Similarly, they may not want to have you in their community. So, the community they form might be smaller, but more aligned with what they want.
They are definitely reducing their pool of customers, but maybe they are still attracting the customers they want. Why not let the market decide if they can find enough customers with this approach.
Honestly, the banks I use in the US often do something similar. It’s not as bad as this, and only on their online banking site, not their marketing site. They have maintenance windows late at night (in their time zone), and don’t allow logins during that time. It’s not always every night, but it’s often enough that I’ve noticed (at 3-4am).
You don't need live support to run a website, you can experience this on most websites that have live support available if you go to their site at 1am local.
I can’t say I’d call this a smart move, but if they still have enough customers to make it worthwhile, I can’t say it’s a bad move. Now, if they can’t get customers or can’t grow because of this, the market will tell them it’s a bad idea.
It’s definitely sub-optimal, from a growth point of view. But so long as it works for them and their customers, why should I care?
Are they the only bank for a region? Or is using them required for some purpose?
The IRS does this on their site to get an EIN[0]. I don’t know why, but it’s bad UX and restricts the usefulness of the site.
[0]: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
I would not patronize a business that had to regularly shut down their website, I would wonder what kind of weak IT department they have and why I would want to invest in that.
Locking bank websites after hours isn't a great proposition for an increasingly cashless society.
Even if the OP thinks everyone is on US time, there are like 3 different time zones even over there...
Even for Black Friday, which could potentially result in them losing business. I can respect it though.
I ended up deciding it would be too much trouble to keep it secure and prevent spam for what amounted to a small idea, but I've been secretly hoping someone else comes up with it someday.
In which timezone?