6 Sep
2001
6 Sep
'01
7:54 a.m.
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.