Down And Out: Aegon's Pension Pothole And TfL's Mystery 'maintenance'

Sometimes, an extended period of "maintenance" can mean a cyber incident. Other times, it can mean an IT team is struggling to make one system talk to another. The travails of Transport for London (TfL) and pensions manager Aegon are examples at both ends of the spectrum.

Aegon's problems started a few weeks ago, as a Register reader who prefers to be known as "Mr Penguin" noted: things were not well on the organization's website.

Logging in to view pension information was somewhat touch-and-go, and when our intrepid reader managed to connect, he found himself sometimes looking at a single pension and other times at three pensions. As for looking at them in more detail? No chance.

Mr Penguin mused: "They tend to do a lot of maintenance at weekends, and a lot of weekends in a year, but it's normally just offline for a few hours."

Tellingly, he added: "The front-end website for these particular pensions has been pretty static in its overall appearance for over a decade, so it's not very modern looking at all."

A spokesperson for Aegon told El Reg: "A limited number of customers are experiencing difficulties with online services. We are sorry this is taking longer than anticipated to fix but we have a dedicated team working as quickly as possible to resolve them. Customers can still submit requests via the website or call us."

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As we understand it, the problem stems from getting data from older systems into newer systems. We're all familiar with the IT delight of persuading two systems to talk when whoever was responsible for the original has shuffled off to pastures new.

Aegon's site is currently festooned with apologies, from "We're sorry, our secure online services are currently unavailable" to "We're sorry but we're experiencing problems with our secure online services – some options are currently unavailable and others are taking longer than they should."

Mr Penguin commented: "It's odd, because it sounds like they can access the data and process stuff manually (or on behalf of clients), so it might just be the web front-end and/or connection to the back-end data. But two weeks to fix?"

Never underestimate the horrors of poking around legacy systems.

Meanwhile, TfL's contactless login page is still down for "maintenance," implying that containment of its cyber incident is ongoing. Despite some very similar messaging on their respective login pages, the two extended outage periods have very different causes.

The two incidents highlight the need for transparency and clarity when systems drop offline. Sometimes, "maintenance" means the bad guys have struck. Sometimes, "maintenance" can mean exactly that. ®