Online banking outages at the $1.6 billion Orlando, Fla.-basedFairwinds Credit Union were so bad this winter, on Feb. 13 CEOLarry Tobin wrote in an email to members that the servicedisruptions were “unacceptable.”

“FAIRWINDS is responsible for the level of service you receive.Frankly speaking, we owe you better service,” he wrote.

Tobin readily assigned blame for the outages: DigitalInsight.

Formerly owned by software company Intuit, the California-basedDigital Insight was sold in Januaryto Georgia-based ATM maker NCR, after private equity investors whohad bought the business from Intuit flipped it after just a fewmonths.

The past year apparently has been rough for many DI customers,which include hundreds of credit unions.

In February, an outage that lasted for hours affected hundredsof DI customers according to a spokeswoman. Other sources claimedall DI customers lost service that day.

At Fairwinds, the outages have triggered many angry posts to theinstitution's Facebook page.

On Feb. 11, Eric King succinctly posted: “Annnnnnnnnd … downagain.”

Rose Lejiste posted on Feb. 21, “Down again??! What is going onover there? This is like the umpteenth time in the last week. Is itserver issues? This is getting to be so annoying.”

On Feb. 6, the credit union itself posted to Facebook.

“We are currently experiencing a service disruption withinFAIRWINDS Online. We have identified the source of the disruptionand are working to correct this as quickly as possible. We willkeep you posted and thank you for your patience,” the postsaid.

The credit union posted similar messages on many other days inthe past month, signaling that the outages were recurrent.

In an interview, Dion Shelton, director, Digital InsightOperations, indicated that the cause of that big February outagewas component failure at a data center hosted by former parentcompany Intuit.

At press time, Intuit had not responded to a request forcomment.

Shelton added that in the works was a move of the DigitalInsight data into a new data center owned by parent NCR. Hesaid location would be “outfitted with the latest and greatesttechnologies.”

Shelton cautioned that that migration had not yet begun and heput no timeframe on the move.

“We are working to get out of the Inuit data center as quicklyas possible but no date has been set,” he said.

Shelton said in the meantime Digital Insight is working closelywith Intuit to mitigate any further issues.

At least one media report had blamed the outages on issuesarising during a migration of Digital Insight data out of theIntuit data center, but Digital Insight said that migration has notyet begun.

The issues experienced by some credit unions in the winter hadnothing to do with any migration, said the company'sspokespeople.

Questions remain about how wide and deep the outages were. In aninterview, Digital Insight executives acknowledged that manyinstitutions had been impacted, at various times, but noquantification was provided.

An executive at an affected credit union who asked not to benamed said ever since Intuit sold Digital Insight last year, his institution has had about threedozen outage incidents with a resulting downtime of more than 100hours.

“Some outages were as long as five hours,” he said.

When asked for comment on that particular complaint, DigitalInsight declined.

At Fairwinds, executive vice president Charlie Lai expressed frustration with the credit union'srecent experience with Digital Insight.

“We have to offer quality services to our members. The DI trackrecord with us has not been what we expected,” he said.

Lai nonetheless expressed optimism about the future.

“We are an NCR shop. We have a long and rich history with them,and Digital Insight now is saying all the right things,” hesaid.

Lai added that when Digital Insight works, it's great. Thefrequency in which it doesn't work is the issue, he said.