Outages at two banks that stopped 2.5 million payment transactions were sparked by a technical issue with the datacenter's cooling system, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday.
DBS and Citibank, the banks involved, experienced outages in the mid-afternoon of October 14, 2023 that resulted in full or partial unavailability of online banking apps for around two days – leaving customers and vendors without a way to make payments in a city-state that is increasingly reliant on digital financial systems.
In fact, according to minister Alvin Tan in a
parliamentary reply, the outages led to 810,000 failed attempts to access the two platforms while 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions could not be completed.
The root cause of the outages was issues in the cooling system that caused the temperature to rise above optimal operating range at the Equinix datacenter used by both institutions.
Equinix has
reportedly blamed a contractor, alleging that person "incorrectly sent a signal to close the valves from the chilled water buffer tanks" during a planned system upgrade.
Upon the outage, both banks immediately activated IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans.
"However," according to Tan, "both banks encountered technical issues which prevented them from fully recovering their affected systems at their respective backup datacenters – DBS due to a network misconfiguration and Citibank due to connectivity issues."
www.theregister.com
