The halcyon days of big banks with big, multi-year IT projects and loyal-to-a-fault customers are gone.

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Beko, which has details of the affected cooker models on its website, said it attempted to contact more 21, 000 customers to warn them of the fault, but nearly 7, 000 had not been contacted.

BBC: Flavel cooker

Many customers were left in the dark, as helpline technicians blamed the fault on the success of BT Cellnet's Easter promotion of Wap phones.

BBC: BT in Wap phone trouble

In July, Barclays briefly shut down its Net banking service after a fault in new software allowed some users to see other customers' accounts.

CNN: Police target online bank fraud

In Northern Ireland, 200, 000 Belfast customers were hit by a blackout on Friday evening due to an electrical fault.

BBC: Landslip body found as weather bites

Guernsey Electricity managing director Alan Bates said the "price rise of this size was not ideal" but the fault had led to increased costs, which are now being passed on to customers.

BBC: Guernsey's 9% electricity rise expected to remain

Starting with two silicon wafers, Soitec machines coat the surface of one with silicon dioxide insulator and embed inside it a thin fault line of hydrogen atoms anywhere from 100 to 20, 000 nanometers below the surface, depending on customers' desired wafer thickness.

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