Bank of America experienced the most Web site downtime among top U.S. banks recently, according to a study by Pingdom, a monitoring service based near Stockholm.
Bank of America’s Web site was down for a whopping 3,065 minutes — the equivalent of about two days and three hours — achieving 96.51% uptime during September and October, Pingdom said in a press release Monday.
First BanCorp.’s Web site ranked as the second worst, with 1,595 minutes of downtime those two months, the equivalent of about 1 day and two hours, achieving 98.18% of uptime. Rounding out the top-five worst offenders list were the sites of Compass Bancshares, with 542 minutes (achieving 99.38% uptime); Colonial Bank, with 453 minutes (99.48% uptime); and PNC Financial Services Group, with 428 minutes (99.51% uptime).
None of these five banks responded to e-mail and phone requests for comment about the Pingdom study.
Web-site downtime leads to lost business and generates customer dissatisfaction, many studies have shown over the years. Depending on the relationship someone has with a company whose Web site is down, downtime can be a minor inconvenience or a major cause for concern. For example, a person may be less upset about being unable to access an online store than about being unable to log into a bank or brokerage account to make a financial transaction.
On the flip side, 36 banks had downtime of fewer than two hours, and among those, six banks achieved 100% uptime, which means their Web sites were unavailable for 4 minutes or less during those two months: Comerica, KeyCorp.’s KeyBank, Wachovia Bank, Marshall & Ilsley Corp.’s M&I Bank, National City Corp. and Washington Mutual.
For this study, Pingdom used its GIGRIB (Green is good, red is bad) monitoring service, which checks the availability of thousands of Web sites using a network of distributed computers, which are owned by GIGRIB users, said Peter Alguacil, an IT analyst with the company.
People who sign up for GIGRIB can have up to 10 Web sites monitored for free, and in exchange they agree to make their PC a node in the monitoring network. The collected data is publicly available and can be accessed here.
Web sites are monitored using different machines located in different places, and a Web site is only flagged as being down if a majority of the computers tapping it are unable to access its home page, Alguacil said. The checks are very light HTTP “head requests” that are satisfied with basic site information and don’t require the entire home page to be loaded, he said. GIGRIB uses computers in various parts of the world, including the United States, Europe and Asia.
