The Monetary Authority of Singapore has instructed DBS and Citibank to investigate the lengthy downtime experienced after a recent outage that disrupted online and payment services.
Between the afternoon of 14 October and the following morning, customers of both banks were unable to access apps, online banking, and payment services such as PayLah! and PayNow. Some ATMs were also inoperable at certain locations.
The outage occurred due to a problem with the cooling system during a planned upgrade at a data center, as reported by provider Equinix. While the banks activated their backup data centers, they failed to fully restore systems within the four-hour timeframe mandated by the regulator.
Although the Monetary Authority of Singapore does not oversee data centers, it expects banks to have contractual agreements with providers that meet its requirements for system availability. The regulator has called for a detailed investigation into why the banks could not resume operations within the specified time and will take “appropriate supervisory actions” following the examination of the facts.
In May, Singapore’s central bank imposed additional capital requirements on DBS after it experienced widespread outages in March, compounded by further disruptions to its digital banking and ATM services two months later.