Santander Bill pay service is dead as a parrot

[bobspud]

Trying to pay my tax bill as late as possible as is the custom... HMRC now want us to use the Bill pay service however it seems to have died on its arse

bloody morons... Have they never heard of scaling the infrastructure designs for peak demand?

They need a proper architect...

[Troll]

Trying to pay my tax bill as late as possible as is the custom... HMRC now want us to use the Bill pay service however it seems to have died on its arse

bloody morons... Have they never heard of scaling the infrastructure designs for peak demand?

They need a proper architect...

Given the predicable last minute rush to pay, I paid mine Tuesday evening, it hurt to give them money early but figured it better than any possible penalties for over shooting the deadline

Agree with the sentiment around peak demand but so much of our infrastructure (inc non IT) is sized to cope with lesser demand

[Gibbon]

Why should the tax payer i.e. you! have to fund a service that can cope with the peak demand on one day a year for those too peevish to pay a few days earlier.

[bobspud]

Given the predicable last minute rush to pay, I paid mine Tuesday evening, it hurt to give them money early but figured it better than any possible penalties for over shooting the deadline

Agree with the sentiment around peak demand but so much of our infrastructure (inc non IT) is sized to cope with lesser demand

At the end of the day when they went to santander and said we want to use your service the number one requirement should be we need it to stand up and work on at least 10 dates in the calendar despite 50 million people wanting to make payments... Visa does not die on its arse at christmas time...

by the way there is a number if anyone else was as dumb as me its 0845 305 1000

[bobspud]

Why should the tax payer i.e. you! have to fund a service that can cope with the peak demand on one day a year for those too peevish to pay a few days earlier.

Because they would have paid through the nose for the service anyway, so it might as well be fit for purpose.

[BolshieBastard]

At the end of the day when they went to santander and said we want to use your service the number one requirement should be we need it to stand up and work on at least 10 dates in the calendar despite 50 million people wanting to make payments... Visa does not die on its arse at christmas time...

by the way there is a number if anyone else was as dumb as me its 0845 305 1000

That presumes they told santander of their requirements.

I worked on the migration of some hmrc account migration onto partenon. I dont recollect seeing any requirement to handle x million peak transactions on specific dates.

[Sysman]

At the end of the day when they went to santander and said we want to use your service the number one requirement should be we need it to stand up and work on at least 10 dates in the calendar despite 50 million people wanting to make payments...

Dunno what platform Santander are using but IBM have been offering extra processing power on demand for years.

Visa does not die on its arse at christmas time...

I did see a supermarket's card payment system slow to a crawl a couple of Christmases ago. Only certain cards were affected and fortunately I had enough cash on me to avoid the "Will it? Won't it?" experience.