NETS apologised via a press release yesterday for the service disruption customers and merchants faced earlier this month, on 2 Feb.
Adding that an investigation report has been submitted to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, the payment network revealed that the disruption was due to human error and not any “systemic risk or security issues”:
“We apologise to all consumers and merchants who were inconvenienced by the disruption. NETS services have since been restored and have been functioning normally.
“We have completed investigations into the cause of the incident and concluded that the incident resulted from an inadvertent human error during system maintenance which disrupted NETS EFTPOS connection to our participating banks.
“The incident was not due to any systemic risk or security issues.”
The organisation added that it is working with an independent consultant to prevent similar incidents from reoccurring in the future.
NETS’ apology did not appear to matter to some netizens who criticised the organisation for the lapse:
Unker Will: No more “technical glitches”. This time is “human error”. Poor computer always kena blamed first for any disruption of services. Hope the rest of Agencies (esp SMRT) dare to admit the same also. Machineries whether mechanical or electronic require constant maintenance and if it is not done properly or even not done at all cannot blame the machineries for breaking down.
Manu Lee: In this country the management has a culture of non-accountability, ie dare not to accept responsibility for bad things happening, such as train, atm machines or network breakdowns. The blame always goes to worker, vendor, weather or poor geomancy in design but not themselves since they are the bosses running the operations. And they call themselves SMART.