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Borklays soz for the ailing ATMs but won't say if fix involved a Microsoft invoice

Yes, here's another one

Bork!Bork!Bork! Barclays, the McDonald's of banking bork, has put its hands up. Yes, there was a problem with some ATMs. A problem that The Register has been more than happy to share.

Some of the pesky self-service devices were, as we have diligently been documenting, running an unsupported version of Windows 7. Indeed, as today's bork demonstrates, somebody has been desperately trying to fix the poor things.

Reg reader Martyn Holland spotted the borkage in Dunfermline, Scotland, and it will bring a shudder of recollection to many an administrator. It appears that an update was tried, on this ATM at least, in the small hours. Sadly, an attempt to shunt a file over to the afflicted device looks like it failed.

Still, at least you've got the log file on a USB stick, right? Right?

We're pretty sure that the "AFD" in the message is for something like an "Automatic File Distributor" rather than an Alphacam woodworking CAD file. Although, to be frank, an ATM made of wood would be of more use to a customer than this example. One could set fire to it for warmth or maybe use some wood shavings to make valuable toilet paper.

While some of the ATM machines were unhappy, The Register understands that the rest of the bank's services were tickety-boo. No unsupported Windows 7 here, no sir, although some branches stayed open a little longer for customers unable to use a borked hole-in-the-wall.

Barclays itself admitted that our readers weren't imagining it: "We're sorry some customers were having issues accessing our ATMs and self-service machines. Everything is now back up and running and we apologise for any inconvenience caused."

We naturally asked if "up and running" meant "we've paid Microsoft for a bit more support" or "we've realised that running vanilla Windows 7 on an ATM was a really bad idea, and we're really sorry," but have yet to receive a response.

Many thanks to the oh-so-many readers who have sent us images of Barclays ATMs in distress. The more the merrier. ®

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