Singapore regulator blasts DBS digital banking outage as ‘unacceptable’
- The Monetary Authority of Singapore ordered the lender to conduct a thorough investigation into the disruption of its digital services that lasted about 10 hours
- The bank assured its customers that their ‘deposits and monies are safe and secure’ following the second outage in less than two years
The Monetary Authority of Singapore takes seriously the reliability of banks’ critical IT systems, and has asked the country’s biggest lender to conduct a thorough investigation and submit its findings, it said in a statement late Wednesday after DBS’ latest outage stretched for about 10 hours.
“DBS has fallen short of MAS’ expectations to maintain high system availability and ensure its IT systems are recovered expeditiously,” the regulator said. “MAS will take the commensurate supervisory actions after gathering the necessary facts.”
While unusual for a sector known for its constant availability, Wednesday’s incident was reminiscent of the outage the bank suffered in November 2021 – one of its worst digital disruptions in the past decade.
Under MAS regulations, financial institutions need to ensure that the maximum unscheduled downtime for each critical system doesn’t exceed four hours within any period of 12 months.