Double whammy.
Incident affecting capita - CHECK
Incident affecting the payment of fines - CHECK
Seems like good news all round.
Capita Pay360 service, which allows small businesses and councils to accept online transactions such as paying parking fines, has gone down in the UK and Ireland due to a "major incident" in its data centre. In an update sent to one customer at 4:15pm BST this afternoon (May 25) and seen by The Register, Capita said remedial …
Well . . . its Crapita. Always on the cheap. Not their fault tbh. They just do what their contract says. What they are paid for. Though I would be having alot of fun with their account manager right now if their contract requires them to maintain a DR capability and can restore service within 2 hours.
Guessing it doesn't. I am working with a client right now who has a contract with a hosting provider that says they are not obliged to continue to provide services if there's a disaster. The guy in the business that signed that keeps querying whether we should be spending money (i.e. paying me) on looking at this stuff instead of working on his next pet project.
You cannot win!!
" The guy in the business that signed that keeps querying whether we should be spending money (i.e. paying me) on looking at this stuff instead of working on his next pet project."
In a previous role I used to come across something similar - people who'd leased long-haul capacity cheaply because it was premptable and were then surprised and angry when it was prempted for restoration purposes during an outage on another part of the network.
You do realise most of the contracts are largely written by the contractor? The government save us money by getting rid of the decent lawyers who can spot a loophole the size of the earth in a contract and the contractors run rings round those left.
To be fair* I wouldn't bother implementing full multi-site DR for a fines payment system, or anything similar. That stuff is expensive. Extending the deadline of fines affected by a couple of days is not.
For those small retailers who are being screwed, one can only hope they or crapita are insured against the lost revenue.
*Crapita, fair, ahaha etc.
"For those small retailers who are being screwed, one can only hope they or crapita are insured against the lost revenue."
Being insured doesn't help much it your business has gone down the tubes by the time the claim goes through.
"The fact that Crapira (got to pull you up on the spelling there AC) these contracts shows what a bunch of fuckheads the competition is."
I'm not sure that's true, Capita are well, you know, a bit crap, but the system is set up to award and reward them and their ilk.
Lots of companies could do better, most won't get very far in the bidding process.
Boys looking after boys and all that...
"I work in a Capita owned business and our office365 emails have also been down since yesterday afternoon. Somthing about a power issue in a data center."