Where Worlds Collide » Hellfest http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog The blogs of Tim Hall Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:33:59 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=3.7.41 Fiasco at a Cashless Fesitval http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/computing/testing/fiasco-at-a-cashless-fesitval/ http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/computing/testing/fiasco-at-a-cashless-fesitval/#comments Fri, 19 Jun 2015 20:01:30 +0000 http://www.kalyr.co.uk/weblog/?p=12951 Continue reading →]]> A lot of rock festivals are going “cashless” with electronic pre-payment cards for all financial transactions on site. A big downside is the way it introduces a single point of failure that can cause things to go seriosuly pear-shaped when you have large volumes of people, with the worst case scenario being tens of thousands of people unable to buy food or drink.

And when it does, people will live-tweet the fiasco on social media.

Now, I’ve only got one person’s account of events to go on, but the comment that they managed to serve precisely four people in a half-hour period suggests something has gone badly wrong with the IT system.

It may have been hardware or software that hadn’t been tested under load. It may have been staff who were insufficiently trained in its use. But whatever it was, the end result was a customer service disaster.

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