Citizen’s Bank Online Gets Scary

When I recently went to citizensbank.com, instead of seeing their normal homepage as I expected, I saw this instead:

Needless to say, my confidence was a bit shaken. Here I was about to do a real transaction with real money, and I get the message that there is a “server error”. In addition to not understanding what went wrong, I’m left with absolutely nothing to do but come back later and retry.

This type of thing doesn’t happen all the much to me, but it does every now and again. And each time I’m left with a choice of whether to continue to use the service or to go elsewhere. It’s a choice that can only be bad for the company in question, and can only do harm to the relationship they worked hard to build with me.

However, I will say that as a web developer I can understand how this might happen. Files don’t always copy over the right way, someone else might have done something silly, or a new plugin fouled things up. A myriad of things might have been the bugaboo.

But on a banking web site? I think I’m once bitten, thrice shy.