Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

• Jul 21, 2006
• 14 Comments
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My company has a small business account at Washington Mutual. I handle a lot of our banking via the online banking website. For several months now, their online banking website has been an absolute pain to use. After logging in I would be unable to access features that are kind of important such as...oh...I don’t know... the register and bill pay!

What was weird is that I would click on the link and would get some error message about calling technical support or an access denied message. But click on it again once (or 10 times) and it would finally work. Right now, the change password feature doesn?t appear to work.

Over time I would send messages to customer service and never get a satisfying response. Finally, Akumi offered to draft up a letter to the President of WAMU after one particularly frustrating bout with the site in which I was fuming.

Fast forward several days and I get a call from a representative who actually knows something about what is going on with the site and doesn’t blame me or my account. He is helpful and gives me his direct line. As he is walking me through some steps, I notice that some of the URLs end with .aspx. Oh, that is a promising sign!

I mention this to the rep because I never noticed it before. Most of the site runs on classic legacy ASP. The rep informs me that this weekend they have a planned upgrade to ASP.NET. That is definitely a step in the right direction!

What others have said

Matthew Jul 25, 2006 6:56 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

From the looks of it, their "upgrade" to .NET over the weekend ended VERY badly. The website account access (and at times, the website in it's entirety) hasn't been available since Sunday.

Tobin M Jul 25, 2006 9:37 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

This upgrade has definatly not been all it was cracked up to be. The site has been up all of 30 minutes in the last 4 days.

I'd say the move was a complete blunder...I'm no Chief Technology Executive but there are these things called testing servers...you can even do load tests on them to simulate real world use but Washington Mutual decided not to go that route and instead has stood by and watched as the entire site came to a screaching hault on Sunday. Booooo Washington Mutual I.S. department....hoooray Beer!

I give em 1 more day and then I'm switching banks.

Tobin

Matthew Jul 26, 2006 9:55 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Do you realize I will have to write paper checks to pay bills? PAPER CHECKS! I don't HAVE paper checks...

Why would they plan such a huge upgrade at the -beginning- of the month?

It seems that everything else is working now.... except bill pay course.

Xibo Jul 26, 2006 1:15 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

E-gads, it's been over four days and still no bill-pay! My conversation with customer service was pretty useless as well... they had absolutely NO IDEA when the system would be working again. As an IT manager, I find this shocking to believe... if we ever released something that put all our customers out of service, it would have been rolled back in the first hour... yet WAMU seems content to let it ride...

I hear Wachovia's online checking is pretty decent; I'll probably be switching to them tomorrow.

Dinesh Jul 26, 2006 2:38 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

I, too am getting fed up with how long we have gone without bill pay. So I am ready to vote with my feet! Any good recommendations? I like the interest bearing Platinum Checking that I get at WaMu. Is there a bank that has a comparable account and a good website?

I hope the CIO gets fired over this. He should!

Rob Jul 27, 2006 5:23 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

I tried to use WAMU online bill pay on Tues, 7/25/2006. A message said the service was temporarily unavailable. Now the service just gives errors. I am writing paper checks today. No big deal for me. However, it is funny that this may be caused by a Microsoft upgrade. A few weeks ago my computer started pestering me about urgent upgrades. It was a Microsoft compliance program that determined that my OS was legitimate. I even had to close all my work and reboot the computer to accept the "upgrade". Microsoft has no hesitation to waste my time, and this is another example of that. This is one computer user who is not waiting for the next Microsoft OS.

wheels4me Jul 27, 2006 10:35 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Talk about suck! I noticed it was down earlier this week and thought, 'oh well, I will try later...' I used it to pay two bills, that only took about 20 minutes and two web browsers. It was not a problem with Firefox, because when I went to IE, it still sucked!

Now instead of being able to pay multiple bills at once, I had to use an even slower web page to pay each bill individually. In only one transaction, I was ready to switch banks.

I love my online bill paying. I sure hope WaMu at least fixes it to be as good as how it used to be. As it is now, it is not usable for me. My line in the sand.... Fix it or I will use my BofA account.

Kevin

Beauzeaux Jul 28, 2006 11:40 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Friday and the site is still nonfunctional. No bill pay. No transfers.
I don't understand
1. How a major bank can perform an upgrade without a way to back out of it.
2. How even a disasterous upgrade could remain unfixed for six days (and counting).
2. How a major bank can have a week-long failure of its system without any news coverage except CNET.

jtt Jul 28, 2006 12:54 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Have already begun my switch over to a competitors bank. WAMU is stonewalling, backtracking and generally denying any wrongdoing... I'm getting my money and my personal information out of their system before any more damage is done....

matthew castillo Jul 28, 2006 3:47 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Well, thank you Computer World. They have heard about our postings here, and written an article about it. Who on earth told them, I have no idea..... *twiddles thumbs* *whistles innocently*.

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9002091

Haacked Jul 28, 2006 5:18 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

Ha ha ha... Well they should have linked to this post rather than just mentioning my site. Otherwise they won't even see this discussion.

Matthew Castillo Jul 29, 2006 9:52 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

I know, that's the suxor. I told them to link, but oh well.... they didn't link to my blog either...

Iphigenia de los galapagos Jul 31, 2006 9:13 AM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

WAMU is still unreliable, for over a week now! Absolutely ridiculous that a major bank could get away with this!

smoking_in_wamuland Aug 03, 2006 3:58 PM

# re: Washington Mutual Upgrades to ASP.NET

I have a newly opened business account with WAMU and have been able to get online exactly once in the past 2 weeks since I opened the account. As of today, I am awaiting the return to functionality of the password reset function since I was locked out when I started typing swear words into the login screen after 50 + attempts to login over the past few weeks ;-)

Interestingly, while I was waiting for the reset password email to come this morning while talking with the WAMU phone rep, I got an email from another bank advertising their business banking. I mention that to the rep and her comment was "that might be wise"....

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