Many customers of Northern Rock were unable to get
reassurance from the company's website during last week's crisis
when it was forced to get an emergency loan from the Bank of
England to prevent it breaching solvency rules.
The
mortgage
lender's loan follows the US sub-prime mortgage crisis, which
has gripped the financial world.
Following media reports branches were
swamped by customers and the website was inundated with
requests.
Following the website problems, Northern Rock said in a message
to customers: "Thank you so much for your patience, particularly
when using our website, which has been running very slowly due to
the number of people working online."
This problem has highlighted the importance of a corporate
website having good load-balancing technologies during a crisis of
this type, where accessing a website is sometimes the only means of
customers getting information fast to prevent heightened panic.
Hackers often use techniques such as
distributed denial of service attacks to crash websites through
high volumes of requests, to damage corporates.
The FSA said the problems of the website were caused by the high
number of customer requests. "Clearly, there have been some
operational problems with queues at some branches and difficulties
with the bank's website caused by the unusually high volumes of
customers trying to access their accounts as a result of the
publicity surrounding Northern Rock," said an FSA statement.
Callum McCarthy, chairman of the FSA, said, "To be absolutely
clear, if we believed that Northern Rock was not solvent, we would
not have allowed it to remain open for business. It is open for
business and it can continue to receive deposits and allow
customers to make withdrawals."