JetBlue sufferred some catastrophic flight cancellations during an ice storm over Valentines. No doubt being lower on the totem pole at the airport, this resulted in people spending up to 8 hours in a plan on the tarmac, or 12 hours in the terminal.
Matt here from 37 Signals does a good job at illustrating how to respond. You cannot stop ice storms but you can learn how to react appropriately. JetBlue are making this one up as they go, but they are trying, and it points to the need to perform periodic emergency drills at your Bank.
Use your web site as a PR tool. Neeleman’s emotional response was nowhere to be found at JetBlue.com though. The latest JetBlue news is the addition of 3 blind moose Merlot and Chardonnay to flights. The last entry at David Neeleman’s blog at the site is titled: 2007 Takes Off in the Right Direction.
Source: Be the guy with the megaphone and other lessons from a JetBlue meltdown – (37signals)
Bankwatch 
I would strongly agree. A bank over here recently had a serious IT problem (their vendor got it really wrong), bringing their entire core banking system down for a couple of days and taking their internet banking presence down for longer. Naturally, their customer were, to put it mildly, p***ed off. What made it worse, though, was the slow information flow. During the whole problem the bank’s website stayed up, but the message about technical problems was not updated. Customers were not clear what the situation was and the number of questions on blogs about who would pay for what was large.
The bank was doing what it could behind the scenes to recover, but keeping that information flow open would have left everyone just that little bit less unhappy about the situation and would certainly have looked more professional.
Having plans to cope with these situations when they happen is not merely a nice to have, but an essential element of sound banking practice.
Thanks Oz … thats a perfect example.
I’m no expert in “disaster recovery”… but it seems to me that too many existing “disaster recovery” plans are too narrowly defined on technology and operations, and not on customer-impact or related “disasters”.