Classic Cases of Performance Testing Failures in Large Organizations

Technology has become so integrated into our lifestyles that we expect or need it to be available 24/7, right?

However, businesses often compromise on testing in the rush to attract customers by adding new features to their websites and mobile apps. Another reason testing suffers is the lack of sufficient investment in IT. The result is a website that crashes or an app that fails to work, and in both cases, a disgruntled customer and a loss of credibility.

Over the last few years, we have seen several instances of technical failure in prominent organizations’ websites and mobile apps. Below are a few such instances: (This blog relies on the research of publicly available information and assumes the authenticity of the articles as is. Please let us know if there is a discrepancy, and we will correct the article.)

1.     Banking and Financial Services:

Major Banking Apps crash: Early this year, customers of major banks like RBS, Barclays, Natwest, and Santander could not access their mobile apps for several hours. The sites were experiencing significant traffic as it was payday, causing the system to crash. Dissatisfied customers took to social media like Twitter to vent their grievances, further putting the banks in a bad light. For an earlier IT failure in 2012, RBS ended up paying £175million to aggrieved customers apart from being fined by FCA.

Lloyds internet banking: In January of this year, Lloyds Bank customers could not use their cards or withdraw money from the ATM for three hours. The glitch affected over 3000 ATMs and left several customers stranded with declined transactions. The problem was determined to be a server failure, which happened on a business-as-usual day when there was no maintenance or update activity in the system.

2.     Health Insurance

HealthCare.gov: The federal government’s health insurance portal showed slow responses and outages soon after it was launched in October last year, resulting in user distress and falling expectations. The website often crashes due to the heavy traffic generated by many users trying to register and use it. The website was never adequately tested for performance and load-bearing capacity.

Massachusetts Health Exchange: Massachusetts revamped its website to meet the demands of the federal Affordable Care Act. The new website was supposed to inform people whether they qualified for a subsidized plan, help them calculate the cost of coverage, and enable them to compare plans and enroll. The website did not work as planned right from the beginning, causing people to file paper applications and even causing several to be without coverage for months, forcing the state to enroll them in temporary insurance plans through the state Medicaid program.

To quote further examples, Ulster Bank, which experienced an IT failure in 2012, leaving nearly 600,000 customers unable to operate their accounts for up to a month, was recently fined £2.75m by the Central Bank of Ireland. In social media, we have the example of a Facebook outage due to the rapid spread of the Like button, which had a ripple effect, slowing down several news and retail sites and affecting Facebook users.

The above incidents are just a few of the many incidents that highlight the need for adequate and efficient performance testing in IT. According to the Web Application Security Consortium study, about 49% of web applications contain vulnerabilities of high-risk levels (Urgent and Critical) detected during automatic scanning. While increasing numbers of customers are moving online and mobile, it would be prudent to leave no room for an application collapse because of performance issues. What do you think?

Are you worried about your application’s vulnerabilities? Cigniti’s Performance testing engineers work with cross-functional technical teams to architect, troubleshoot, automate, and analyze performance testing-related projects and issues. Know more.