The second failure this year of the bank transfer system once again came out of the blue, and once again came with assurances it can't happen again.
On New Year's Eve, it seemed that programmers for the banking system forgot to tell the ATM computers that the calendar was rolling over. Last Friday morning, payday for virtually every employee in the country, bank computer systems were overwhelmed with "too many users" trying to do ordinary banking.
And in truth, last week was the third failure of the heavily promoted, government supported PromptPay cashless system. Just over two years ago, after numerous warnings from legal and technology experts, banks had to take the software offline for a security rewrite. Embarrassingly, that was days after Finance Minister Apisak Tantivorawong touted the high security of PromptPay. It took another year, until June of 2017, before the banks declared the transfer system was "a big success".
