Please define "buggy software." Can you point to a single confirmed case in the US of a person's bank account balance disappearing, or even a deposit not appearing, due to a software bug? I doubt it. Banks' core software is rock solid or they would be out of business very, very quickly.

You've cited two comparatively minor failures confined to a very small subset of what banks do. There's a whole lot of critical software systems in banks that don't touch personal bank accounts. If you've ever worked on bank systems before, it was certainly in a very limited capacity.

I did code-level support for a large internal data management system for the federal reserve bank in the mid aughts. I'm not really interested in disclosing the specific bland but critically important data we moved/managed. It involved a giant amalgam of legacy commercial AIX and HP-UX software with some newer Java stuff in a Websphere environment. It was all duct-tape-and-bubble-gummed together with huge ksh88 scripts that were in constant development by devs and support people like me who'd just ssh into production systems to make changes. None of the internal software had dev/test systems, there was definitely no code review, and there was no version control. Yep. The system on a whole required constant monitoring and intervention to keep it plodding along. We did periodically see data loss that was unrecoverable from a technological standpoint but recovered with physical media kept around from their necessarily belt-and-suspenders business practices and tons of available staff for data entry. I reckon tens-of-thousands of folks outside the bank would have been affected per incident.

Money disappearing from a bank account is a "comparatively minor failure"? Sorry, I stopped reading at that point.

If you're committed to not knowing something then I can't stop you.

But compared to, say, tens of thousands of investment transactions for pension and retirement funds evaporating, disbursements to a hospital's operations budget being delayed, sending confidential historical balance records in bulk to a large corporate customer's competitor, having an online investment system down during a period of extreme market volatility, or even large-scale customer data breaches, then yes. 'Money missing from a bank account' is in every significant way a comparatively minor problem probably fixable with a phone call and a couple hours of investigation on the bank's part, even with a significant sum of money. The bank would almost certainly catch it themselves during an automated audit. It's exactly the sort of problem that bookkeeping organizations are designed to mitigate and root out if they do happen.

The others could affect many, many more people's lives for much longer— potentially permanently.

Has that really not happened to you or someone you know? It is (typically) eventually recovered, yes; and you can often understand how/why it happened. But it definitely happens, and requires manual human intervention for fixing. Here's 2 incidents that happened to me or friends in the last month:

- took a trip to the neighboring country, my friend tried to take out money from an ATM; first two transactions failed, third succeeded (at the atm). In the bank though, all "succeeded", and money were gone (first 2 eventually were reversed with manual intervention).

- I sold a house (in a remote mountain village), buyer sent 8100EUR from Germany, 78xy.z EUR made it to my personal bank account. Apparently due to multiple currency exchanges, but this is a SEPA transfer between two accounts both denominated in EUR, this was absolutely not supposed to happen and nobody was able to articulate exactly "why it happened" (or even exactly what happened). For this one the buyer decided to just eat the loss and sent me an additional 300EUR.

Money disappearing is a minor failure in the sense that it is easy to track. Banks do daily audits to check that money sent in one side is deposited in another. If there is any issue, they will track it and rectify within the 3 days grace period created exactly to work around these bugs.

There have been major bank tech failures too, if you wanted to see major vs minor side by side...

Not the US, but in the UK which I think is comparable:

* https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/28/many-hsbc-cust... (I believe this one was caused by firing greybeards who understood a certain very complicated batch processing system and offshoring to undertrained staff in India who then make a mistake and basically brough the entire system down as a knock-on effect)

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/19/tsb-it-melt... (Insufficiently tested software upgrade although to be fair this was a major upgrade)

* https://scottishfinancialnews.com/article/rbs-it-failure-pre... (Not sure on root cause. Other interesting stats at the bottom of the article regarding failure counts)

Now, in all these cases I believe the outages lasted a few days at least where people had limited or no access to bank accounts, salaries not paid on time, incorrectly charged overdraft fees, automated payments not happening etc.

It can probably be argued what is "core" here and as far as I know no money actually disappeared into the ether but, in the UK at least, I am not sure I would be so confident in my declaration of Rock Solid software.

Thanks, these examples confirm my point. The old, ancient, "outdated" (as the original poster claimed) software worked fine for years/decades. The failures that you cited were introduced during an upgrade, a rewrite/outsourcing, or due to a 3rd party outage.

But requirements change, so upgrades are a normal part of business, due to at the bare minimum legal reporting requirements changing, even if there weren't all sorts of new things like internet banking making their old APIs inadequate.

If the software isn't extendable or changeable then it isn't 'working fine', because if you can't offer internet banking or do FATCA reporting you go out of business or get shut down.

Transaction reversibility, fear of law enforcement and the ability to react to things is the reason why the bank tire fire doesn't collapse on itself.

im sure glad the cryptocurrency folks seem intent on throwing all three of those away at once.

Banks have procedures and regulations that protect customers from those issues. In fact there's a lot of of secondary checks and offline reconciliation precisely to catch potential software errors.

It is not, based on the loopholes one has to jump through for basic support.

What do you mean by 'useful' here? Facebook goes down for half a day and everybody laughs. Take 'banks' down for the same amount of time and see what happens.

It's pretty standard for banks to "go down" outside the hours of 9am-5pm. Nearly everything meaningful that a bank does is processed in batch, often with days-long delays.

Operationally, Facebook is a vastly harder problem.

Multi-hour outages are already relatively common and getting more frequent by the year for banks. About 10 days ago there was a massive Bank of America outage.

You certainly don't use banks often, because their systems being offline for several hours is a relative common event.