The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has ordered DBS and Citibank to conduct “a thorough investigation” following an hours-long outage of key financial services over the weekend.
In response to CNA queries, MAS said on Thursday (Oct 19) that unscheduled downtime for a critical service affecting a bank’s operations or service to customers must not exceed four hours within any 12-month period.
t noted that the banks were not able to fully recover their systems within the required timeframe.
“MAS has instructed both banks to conduct a thorough investigation on why they were not able to do so and will take appropriate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts,” a spokesperson said.
The service interruption on Saturday was caused by a technical issue with the cooling system at a data centre used by DBS and Citibank, according to data centre provider Equinix.
The issue with the chilled water system, which occurred during a planned system upgrade, raised temperatures in some of the halls in the data centre, affecting equipment and customer operations.
This caused DBS and Citibank online banking and payment services to go offline from around 3pm on Saturday, with services only fully resuming on Sunday morning.
