Singapore says DBS, Citi report 2.5 million failed transactions from outage
- Up to 810,000 attempts to go through the two lenders’ online platforms failed during the October 14 outage, Minister of State Alvin Tan says
- Separately, DBS says its exposure to a money laundering scandal in Singapore is about US$74 million
Up to 810,000 attempts to access both digital banking platforms were estimated to have failed during the October 14 disruption due to a data centre malfunction, Minister of State Alvin Tan said in response to parliamentary questions on Monday. Services had only fully recovered in the early hours of October 15.
DBS and Citibank both faced technical issues in recovering their systems despite having activated their IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans, Tan said. Specific issues that led to the delays did not surface during their annual tests, the minister said.
The central bank has also raised the maximum fine amount to S$1 million (US$740,200) next year from the current S$100,000 if financial institutions fail to meet technology risk management requirements.
The government will also study how to further strengthen the security and resilience of data centres, where lapses could result in a significant impact, Tan said.