How Can a Major Bank Like Capital One Be Offline for 24 Hours? (opens in new tab)

One of the radio links in my network was down for 3 hours a few days ago. Why? An unintended interaction between parameters on the Ubiquiti radio on the client side of the link collided with a DFS radar detection event on the access point side. The access point thought it had detected radar and randomly changed to a channel the client side wasn't scanning.

As another ISP is using most of the 5GHz spectrum in the area, there are only a couple of channels that have low enough levels of interference to get decent performance out of the link. I had restricted the channels the client was scanning to reduce the recovery time from a loss of link a couple of years ago, but being groggy too early in the morning my brain took a trip to both ends to figure it out, and then more than an hour to find a channel that didn't suck.

All of this is because 10 years ago when I talked to our Local Distribution Company that owns the poles on a 2km stretch where I want to run fibre to eliminate the radio link, the design tech said they would need to replace 10 poles at a cost of nearly $100k. Sorry, I'm not paying $100k to replace 10 poles that are near the end of their useful lifespan to place $750 worth of 24 count fibre.

Complexity has unintended consequences: Lesson re-learned.

Here is an email I got more than 24 hours after my accounts have been unavailable:

Valued customer,

Starting Jan. 15, 2025, Capital One began experiencing a disruption in our payment processing and account balance updates, which is due to a technical issue with one of our service providers.

This may have also delayed timely processing of transactions such as wires, ACH, book transfers and loan closing disbursements as well as opening new accounts.

We’re working closely with our provider to resolve this issue and restore processing as quickly as possible. We expect services to gradually begin to return to normal throughout today and the majority of issues to be resolved by tomorrow morning.

We assure you that we are taking this event very seriously and that your accounts remain secure. We sincerely apologize for the disruption and are doing everything we can to address this as quickly as possible.

Once service is restored, you’ll be able to sign in and view your account information online or through the Capital One Mobile app. At that time, feel free to call us at 888‑755‑2172, 8 a.m.‑8 p.m. ET, Monday through Friday for further assistance

With banks it could be that they are being very careful in their recovery process to ensure everything reconciles properly. Otherwise they could create a cascading set of issues. But the lack of details in their notice is frustrating and I wonder if it is something more serious like a breach.

Power outage at one of their vendors (Fidelity).

Nos sure if sarcasm, but it does not. It will never get even close of handling 10% of CO's amount of transactions.