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French bank Societe Generale says it has uncovered “massive” fraud by a Paris-based trader which resulted in a loss of 4.9bn euros.

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The bank said the fraud was based on simple transactions, but concealed by “sophisticated and varied techniques”.

It also announced new write-downs of 2.05bn euros related to the sub-prime mortgage crisis in the US.

The bank’s shares, which were suspended in the morning, lost 3.6% when they resumed trading.

Anybody have more info on this?

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Measuring the number of minutes of downtime per year does not predict the number of minutes of downtime you’ll have the next year. It reminds me of commercial aviation today: the NTSB has done such a great job of eliminating all the common causes of crashes that nowadays, each commercial crash they investigate seems to be a crazy, one-off, black-swan outlier.

Somewhere between the “extremely unreliable” level of service, where it feels like stupid outages occur again and again and again, and the “extremely reliable” level of service, where you spend millions and millions of dollars getting an extra minute of uptime a year, there’s a sweet spot, where all the expected unexpecteds have been taken care of. A single hard drive failure, which is expected, doesn’t take you down. A single DNS server failure, which is expected, doesn’t take you down. But the unexpected unexpecteds might. That’s really the best we can hope for.

To reach this sweet spot, we borrowed an idea from Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota. He calls it Five Whys. When something goes wrong, you ask why, again and again, until you ferret out the root cause. Then you fix the root cause, not the symptoms.

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