Extra money in your bank account always seems nice. Until you realize it was a glitch.
The software that powers our everyday lives (and our lives are literally run on software) is often subject to problems and errors. As of late, most people hear that there’s a technology problem and automatically assume it’s a cyberattack because that’s what we’ve been dealing with for the last two years. But software can have problems that aren’t related to someone hacking it, software also has bugs and glitches. And while those terms are sometimes used interchangeably, a bug and a glitch are not the same thing.
A bug in software can be defined as an error, flaw or failure that causes it to produce unexpected results or behave in unintended ways. These can be new vulnerabilities discovered by researchers, known vulnerabilities that have not been fixed or anything in between. But it’s not limited to weak points in your system, a bug can also cause incorrect math to happen or incorrect data analysis or a number of other problems. A glitch, on the other hand, is a temporary problem, typically something that resolves quickly and doesn’t happen again.
Recently, a Spanish bank suffered a glitch that caused over $170 million in duplicate payments around Christmas. When extra money suddenly shows up in your bank account, it’s usually a cause for celebration. After all, who doesn’t need or want a little extra cash? But what if extra money shows up in your account and you have to give it back? That’s exactly what some 2,000 customers of Santander Bank UK dealt with over the last week and a half. Banco Santander UK caught the glitch and fixed it relatively quickly, but now they are on a mission to recoup those funds.
The extra fund deposited came from Santander’s own reserves, so no commercial or corporate accounts were impacted. Luckily for the bank, financial institutions usually have a process to recover this money called the “bank error recovery process” which allows them to recoup the funds from third-party banks through an industry-approved process. Since the impacted people are mostly employees and suppliers of businesses that bank with Santander, there are many third-party banks involved in this process.
“We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” a Santander spokesperson told CNBC.
“None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”
Remember, this was a glitch, not a bug. The problem was a scheduling issue which has since been resolved. The business involved is still out millions of dollars, which it may or may not get back. This is one of those instances when no one did anything wrong, no one intentionally trying to steal money or give the bank’s money away, a glitch that no one could have predicted. It’s chalked up as “one of those things,” and everyone moves forward.
So, computers are hard, we say that a lot and even have a whole series dedicated to it. Glitches happen. The best way to prepare is to have proper incident response in place for such events. There should be a clear procedure in place and who to contact in what situation with phone numbers included. The less thinking someone has to do in the midst of a stressful event, the better, even if said event is “just” a glitch. And don’t let the size of your business deter you, every business should have incident response plans ready to go for a variety of situations.