ATM failure - No the other kind of ATM

Thu Sep 6 11:54:17 UTC 2001

According to today's Wall Street Journal, Citibank is explaining
the outage as "software", and declining to release further details.
But the article also noted that

	many of the computer systems on which banking networks
	are based are aging -- and trouble-shooters who can fix
	problems quickly are becoming rarer. Indeed, most banks
	and Wall Street firms run on a mishmash of systems slapped
	together after years of computer upgrades and bank mergers.
	hey are made all the more confusing by the profusion of
	computer languages that run the Internet. Most of them are
	incompatible with their mainframe predecessors.