Singapore — Thousands of digital banking clients of DBS Bank and POSB have been left disgruntled and frustrated so far this week over the failure of their digibanking services as it extended into the third day.
Singapore’s largest bank DBS, which also owns POSB, had been vigorously campaigning to get customers to convert to digibanking. This latest stumble could well slow the impetus of its aggressive digital evangelism.
The trouble began on Monday when bank customers found themselves unable to access DBS Bank and POSB digital services beginning, some say, at 9 am. By 11 am, the outage was plain.
By noon on Tuesday (Nov 23), DBS had already garnered almost 2,000 complaints online after its digital services became inaccessible to users.
On Wednesday evening, in chat groups, DBS customers were still complaining about how frustrating it was not to be able to log into their digital banking accounts – an ironic backhanded compliment to the success of DBS Bank’s campaign to push customers to digibanking.
At around 3 pm on Tuesday, DBS announced via Facebook that services had been “fully restored” only to announce later on, “Unfortunately, yesterday’s digital banking issue has recurred, and this has affected our services”.
“We know this has affected many of our customers, and we are doing our best to resolve the situation. We apologise for the inconvenience caused”.
This apology does not seem to have mollified its customers. In response to the disruption, aplenty have erupted online, with not a few unhappy clients saying that the duration of the outage was unacceptable.
“How long will it take? It’s really not a good sign that banking system downtime is too long like this. I have been using your service for many years already, never disappointed like this before. We really need to access our account asap,” said Facebook user Pale Pink.
“Hi DBS, you’re the biggest bank in Singapore, in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It’s unacceptable to down your system for more than half a day. Imagine if I had sent my car for servicing today, I would have been stuck there unable to leave due to unsettled payments,” said another concerned individual.
A woman in her 70s, who said she had been a DBC customer since 1974 and was recently persuaded to sign up for the digital banking service PayNow, said the failure has brought back all her fears about e-banking.
She told TISG that she tried many times on Monday to make a small reimbursement to a friend before finally giving up and mailing the friend a cheque for $20. She had no idea that there had been a widespread outage until a friend told her. “I think I’ll just go back to using cash and cheques,” she said.
Based on an earlier version of DBS’ post, the bank cited “intermittent slowness” with the services.
“Some of our customers are facing intermittent slowness when accessing our banking services, and we are currently working to resolve this,” said DBS.
Having the bank describe the disruption as “intermittent slowness” has riled some customers even more than the inconvenience.
Many netizens commented that the issue was an outage, not “intermittent slowness” given that the services were inaccessible.
“Slowness implies there is some speed no matter how low. It is simply not working. Is DBS into gaslighting their customers now?” asked Facebook user Zhaohan Chua.
“Not’ intermittent slowness.’ It’s a complete cut off since this morning for 12 hours or so. Nightmare to DBS customers. A downtime should not be this long! It’s totally not acceptable,” said another user.
On Wednesday morning, several more users commented on as they were still unable to log in to their digital accounts.
“Hi. I am unable to log in to my account since yesterday morning till now. I ordered some things online yesterday, and I can’t check if the payment went through. It is really stressful,” said Facebook user Mona Anne Lim.
“Down means down, lah; don’t patronise me by saying it was up just now. Does that make a difference to consumers?” said another user.
Others suggested that updating the app, which might address the issue. /TISG
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