Overheating Datacenter Stopped 2.5 Million Bank Transactions
The Register, Monday, November 6,2023
Running infrastructure in the tropics has its challenges - but so do failed disaster recovery plans
Outages at two banks that stopped 2.5 million payment transactions were sparked by a technical issue with the datacenter's cooling system, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday.
DBS and Citibank, the banks involved, experienced outages in the mid-afternoon of October 14, 2023 that resulted in full or partial unavailability of online banking apps for around two days - leaving customers and vendors without a way to make payments in a city-state that is increasingly reliant on digital financial systems.
In fact, according to minister Alvin Tan in a parliamentary reply, the outages led to 810,000 failed attempts to access the two platforms while 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions could not be completed.