SINGAPORE: For the second time in one week, DBS customers were inconvenienced when the bank experienced an outage. On Oct 14 (Saturday), online banking and payment services were unavailable, with the bank saying this was due to an issue at a data centre used by other organisations. On Friday morning (Oct 20), some PayLah! users found the service inaccessible, saying they had been getting error messages.
By 11:40 am, the service had returned to normal, DBS said in an update via Facebook post, adding, “Thank you for your patience and once again, we apologise for the inconvenience caused.” The bank had earlier told clients unable to access PayLah! that they could use DBS digibank Scan & Pay & DBS/POSB debit or credit cards for payments.
However, the outage caused some of the bank’s customers difficulties. One woman wrote on the COMPLAINT SINGAPORE Facebook page that she was embarrassed in front of a cashier when she was unable to pay.
“Thanks DBS. I have been trying to use Paylah this morning and guess what? I keep getting this Error message. Didn’t bring cash with me this morning because I had the impression that the whole DBS saga was fixed and over. The aunty at the stall looked at me as if I wanted to freeload off her and I looked at her in embarrassment. Wondering what your tech guys are doing to have so many outages in such a short period of time? Drinking masala chai at the canteen?” she wrote, adding a screenshot of the error message she had been getting.
Over on Reddit, users on the platform also complained that they had been unable to log in on Friday morning. When one netizen listed the dates of DBS disruptions reported on the news this year, another answered, “Walao, if I made that many major mistakes I would have long ago been put on PIP and fired.”
On Oct 19 (Thursday), the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) instructed DBS Bank and Citibank Singapore to hold an extensive investigation after the banks had been unable to recover their systems fully within the necessary timeframe in the Oct 14 unscheduled outage.
“MAS requires all banks to ensure that their critical systems and services to customers are resilient to disruption. Banks are required to have in place back-up data centres and systems and test them periodically to ensure that critical systems and services can be restored within 4 hours following an outage. In addition, the unscheduled downtime for a critical system affecting a bank’s operations or service to customers must not exceed 4 hours within any 12-month period,” said the Central Bank in a statement.
/TISG
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