FNB Online Banking Updates/Upgrades

I have been active in the IT industry for 10 years. I understand how online systems work, especially when you have upgrades, hot fixes or bug fixes. FNB decides to go offline and do system upgrades on their online infrastructure while it is the day when most salaries needs to be paid.

Today at approximately 15:00 FNB online went offline. Not the entire online banking system, but only a couple of features, i.e. Make payments, see transaction history, etc.

As most companies, we make commitments to our employees to pay their salaries on the 25th. Now we sit with red faces and upset employees who has their own financial commitments.

My recommendation to FNB would be to rather WAIT until between the 10th and 15th of every month before performing system upgrades. Schedule these updates for the EVENING when the system is least busiest. This was not the first occurrence of the online site being partially available.

If systems gets unstable when overloaded with users, the underlying hardware/infrastructure should be upgraded. FNB being the leader in technology and innovation should really have a look at investing some money towards their infrastructure to be more robust and reliable.

With the rate of the systems being offline regularly, FNB will lose valuable customers.