Singapore Biggest Bank DBS/ POSB ATM & Online Banking FAIL!! - 05/07/2010

SINGAPORE : The banking network of Singapore's largest lender DBS and sister bank POSB crashed on Monday morning when a technical glitch affected its entire online system for over seven hours.

The banking outage sparked anger and frustration among customers who needed to access the system urgently.

It is not a good start to the week for 44-year-old Teo Thiam Chye. At 8 in the morning, the engineer tried to log on to DBS Bank's online banking services, only to find that the system was down.

And worse still, he discovered that DBS Bank's ATMs across Singapore were out of service.

Mr Teo, a DBS customer, said: "What if we need cash urgently? The reason why I want to access the Internet is that I need to check whether my cheque is cleared. I've a cheque that I banked in that I'm expecting to clear by today, and all this information I can't get (at)."

Mr Teo is not the only unhappy customer. Numerous customers also called Channel NewsAsia's hotline to complain about not being able to use the bank's ATMs.

Ms Daisy Wong said: "(At) 8.30, I came down to withdraw money, but the ATM - all spoilt. (I was) so frustrated because I need to do marketing. So I went back home again."

Scores of DBS and POSB customers took to the social media to vent their anger. Some said they had visited as many as five different ATMs, but were left cashless and unable to top up their cash cards to pay for Electronic Road Pricing (ERP).

The breakdown was reported as early as 6.30am.

DBS said it regrets that banking services at DBS and POSB were temporarily unavailable on Monday morning.

"We detected the problem at 3am this morning, and our priority was to restore our systems expeditiously and ensure complete data integrity was maintained. Our branch and ATM services were restored at 10am and all other systems were progressively restored by lunchtime," DBS said in a statement.

"During the first 1.5 hours of branch operations from 8.30am to 10am, we took proactive measures to ensure that there was minimal disruption to customers who needed cash urgently for their day-to-day needs."

DBS said all cash cheques of S$500 and below were honoured on the spot. Customers could also withdraw cash over-the-counter.

Additional staff members were deployed to the branches and call centre.

All DBS and POSB branches were opened for an extra 2 hours, from 4.30pm to 6.30pm, to assist customers with their banking needs.

Mr Piyush Gupta, CEO, DBS Group Holdings, said: "Actually we have very good safeguards. We have multiple redundancies built into our systems and it's actually quite perplexing that the redundancies did not kick in as we normally would expect it to.

"We're currently doing thorough investigations with our vendor IBM to understand why the redundant systems did not kick in. We also have a disaster-recovery site, so frankly we were pretty confident we could switch over to our disaster-recovery, which we were priming as we went along.

"The thing with disaster-recovery is that it takes time to fire up, and so the redundant systems are the best way to make sure that we have instant switch-over. So we're going to investigate that."

Mr Gupta added that he does not think it was a case of sabotage. He said the customer database had not been compromised as a result of the glitch.

DBS has the most extensive network of 81 branches and more than 900 ATMs in Singapore, including those belonging to POSB.

- CNA

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