I remember trying to book a rail ticket in india the night before my flight there, only to find out (through lots of googling) that their system goes down <i>every night</i> for 'maintenance' (I guess to run nightly scripts and stuff without updates happening)<p>Everybody seemed to know this, everybody seemed to think it's normal, but as a foreigner i thought the site had crashed.<p>for those interested: <a href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation/railways/irctc-wont-let-you-book-train-ticket-at-this-hour/system-upgrade/slideshow/66568562.cms" rel="nofollow">https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/transportation...</a>
World’s only? This was commonplace in Germany maybe 10 years* ago. All (or at least both I knew which were decently large ones: Postbank and NordOstee Sparkasse) Banking websites would shut down every night and usually on Sunday as well. This was very annoying for the night-owl I was back then.<p>* My perception of time is notoriously bad, but I know for sure it was later than 2005
Sometimes these requirements aren't as ridiculous as they sound.<p>Some websites are subject to legislation* that requires real people to be available to assist. So if they use local employees to provide assistance, the website ends up being shut down outside of business hours.<p>This isn't a US bank, but if you see a US government site do this for example, that's usually why.<p>(* an incidental "benefit" of legislation like this is regulatory capture. It doesn't matter if some code mill like Accenture is the worst <i>technical</i> choice, they already have experience providing warm bodies for the phone line. It raises the bar for getting contracts incredibly high since they're treated as a package deal)<p>-<p>Edit response because I'm being rate limited...<p>It's all rooted in Section 508: <a href="https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/</a><p>> Under Section 508, agencies must give disabled employees and members of the public access to information comparable to the access available to others.<p>Each state has their own extensions and guidance too: <a href="https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/state/" rel="nofollow">https://www.section508.gov/manage/laws-and-policies/state/</a><p>And in combination with those state amendments sometimes "access to information comparable to the access available to others" ends up being translated into needing someone to be accessible at all hours that the site is operated.<p>One thing to remember is that behemoths like Accenture and co also get to tip the scale. The law is vague enough that maybe in theory you could argue that you don't need a live human to meet the requirement... that won't stop incumbents for putting proposals that make it the defacto approach.
I think having “business hours” for websites is an interesting experiment that could help foster a sense of community as people must visit around the same time as everyone else. Also saves on server costs.<p>Imagine for instance if Hackernews was only open from 12pm to 11pm on weekdays and until 1 AM on weeekends.
Florida put queues and business hours on its employment assistance website during the pandemic. Not sure if they've lifted them. But for a while there, it was a excellent deterrent for would-be applicants!
I've seen other smaller banks do the same as recently as a few years ago. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still dozens of banks in the US that still do this. There are 4,200+ banks in the US.
My university’s self-service website would shut down from something like 10pm-4am every single day for batch jobs. This was used for EVERYTHING: Paying into your account, checking grades, registering for classes, webmail, etc. It seemed fairly antiquated at the time (2001 or so).
This reminds me that Merrill Edge offers some money market mutual funds as an alternative to the default settlement account that pays no interest, but the catch is that you have to place buy/sell orders during a subset of market hours.
This happens in Canada for credit unions and some online banks.<p>Fun fact, there exists a bug with EQ Bank where a deleted savings account still counts towards the maximum of 5 savings accounts. The customer service agent indicated this was a known bug and <i>had been for some time</i>! I'm planning to leave within the next year.