Zopa upcoming site changes - (18/22 Jan - 29 Jan)

Not that I expect to get anywhere on this issue but I have just emailed to put in a formal complaint.

I withdraw all funds repaid on a daily basis and not having access to fund sitting idle in Holding from Jan22-Jan 29 due to an IT issue which Zopa have is clearly unacceptable.

I have said if my Bank told me that I would immediately close the account and would contact Martin Lewis for his Thursday show.

I am just glad I have sold out what I could in their P2P offering and now am slowly withdrawing the late payments.

That's an interesting thought - psst! don't tell Mrs Aju she'll be on my back again or worse asking for funds from her Zopa bank investment. Mind you that said it's not in her best interest to remove the funds for at least another 10 months or more anyway! 

"We'll be right back!"


I didn't expect this. 



Will Z do something for make us will good for their wrongs?

I don't see where they said it's an "IT issue", what they did say was "essential site maintenance". From my experience in the IT world this sounds more like a planned upgrade. If an upgrade requires moving data between systems or bulk changes to records then these can take a long time to process and generally need no (or very few) other changes at the same time. Banks have done the same as well (TSB notably in 2018 where a planned weekend migration went wrong).

I wouldn't be surprised if the big banks had a lot more redundancy in place than most P2P firms which might allow some work to happen in the background, however that comes with a huge price tag. There's a general rule that for every additional 9 you add for redundancy you add a zero to the price tag, so something that costs £100k and gives 99.99% (four nines) uptime (52.6 minutes unplanned downtime a year) will cost £1m for 99.999% (five nines) uptime (5.26 minutes unplanned downtime a year). Going to 99.9999% (six nines) could add another £9m to the price tag for an extra 4.7 minutes uptime (31.56 seconds unplanned downtime a year). A lot of the extra costs at that level will be around reducing human error and finding unexpected single points of failure (which could include unexpected things like a motorway crossing a railway line).

I've had similar things to yourself but managed to get round it by waiting for the first failure and just using the go back button and re-sending the request. Probably not the same as my data is probably not that large. My experience from work days suggested to me that the server needed a little push start to wake it up and then the next hit would be within the timeout time of the front end to back end. Probably wrong but it stunk of that syndrome for me. Its been like that for over 2 years but always worked for me most times.

It seemed to be less the case for loanbook requests than for statements but then the amount of data in the statements system relative to the statments tables would quite an order of magnitude increase.

I'm happy to be wrong and the timeout on the backend internal retriever might be running into itself too for really large books.   

I had a feeling it was a bit more of a serious issue for yourself from your comments here and elsewhere.

Since their so called improvements in the past have not actually made much of a difference, in my view, and their endless exit and entry routes to login and logout are becoming a joke i'm not convinced they really know what they are doing anymore.

I feel your pain though and to be fair I do seem to be having to loop it more than once myself some days. I've taken the liberty of using my own saved links to the pages i need to get to as fast as i can. Works as long as I remember to go round the exit loop a few times to clear login cookies for the next session. (Stops me from logging in and it immediately logging me back out especially when Mrs Aju distracts me for a few minutes as well.) 

If their back end skills are as good/bad as their front end design skills then sadly it may not make much difference. One of my big gripes with this country is how many companies threw their computer and systems expertise away to other countries 10 years or more back and when they wanted to bring systems and people back all best expertise had moved on or worse retired or took a kings reward and retrained elsewhere. (One of our biggest comms companies has this issue in abundance these days but i'm not bitter!  )