Citizens Bank screws the pooch on weekend “upgrade”

Citizens Bank “upgraded” their online banking site over the past two weekends.

This morning, when I attempted to log in, here’s what I experienced:

• 30 seconds to load the initial login page
• 72 seconds to load the identity verification page (i.e., “you’re using a computer without one of our cookies already in its browser cache, so you need to answer one of your security questions”)
• 57 seconds to load the password entry page
• 95 seconds to load the home screen, and several page elements were missing when it finished loading

Total: four minutes and fourteen seconds to log into a broken site

Afterwards, I tested from two other independent internet connections and saw similar results.

Some upgrade, eh?

I’m sure they’ll eventually figure out what’s wrong and fix it, but still, haven’t they ever heard of load testing?

One would hope that whoever is responsible for this debacle will be getting coal in their performance-review stockings this year.