eBucks.com, sometimes - and particularly recently - known by less complimentary variations on its name, collapsed over the September month-end.

On September 20, technicians at eBucks.com started what was meant to be routine monthly maintenance and upgrading of the online banking site`s back-end systems. Instead, it marked the beginning of one of the most embarrassing failures of a bank`s critical infrastructure that South African consumers have seen in recent years.

For the next two weeks, customers who depend on the site to pay monthly bills, deposit salaries for employees and perform other transactions suffered slow service and frequent, lengthy outages as eBucks.com IT employees struggled to restore the site to normal operation.