Singapore’s Two Banks Unable to Process Transactions Due to Data Center Overheating
Singapore’s Two Banks Unable to Process Transactions Due to Data Center Overheating
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Singapore’s Two Banks Unable to Process Transactions Due to Data Center Overheating
Singapore, located just north of the equator at 137 kilometers, experiences distinct seasons with consistent temperatures and humidity throughout the year.
The tropical climate can pose challenges for the island’s data centers, especially when issues arise during system upgrades.
On October 14th, DBS Bank and Citibank faced IT failures that impacted millions of payment transactions in Singapore. Banking applications became unresponsive, servers failed to connect, and customers of these two banks were left unable to make purchases or receive payments.
The city-state heavily relies on digital banking systems, and government authorities are now considering this approach from a different and more cautious perspective.
Singapore’s Minister of State, Alvin Tan, confirmed during a parliamentary session that the October disruption rendered DBS Bank and Citibank’s online banking services either partially or entirely unusable. The root cause of the problem was later identified as a malfunction in the cooling system of the Equinix data center used by both banks, leading to elevated server temperatures beyond optimal operating conditions.
Tan stated this week that the outage resulted in 810,000 access attempts failing and 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions not going through. According to Equinix, the overheating issue was caused by a contractor erroneously issuing a “close water buffer tank valve” signal during a planned system upgrade.
DBS Bank and Citibank had contingency plans in place for such scenarios, but these plans proved to be of no use. The Singaporean government mentioned that DBS Bank was unable to access its backup data center due to “network configuration errors,” and Citibank faced some unspecified connectivity issues.
Both financial institutions failed to meet the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) requirements regarding critical IT system recovery capabilities. MAS regulations state that unplanned downtime for key banking systems should not exceed 4 hours within a 12-month period, a limit clearly breached in October.
Kevin Reed, Chief Information Security Officer of Singaporean backup firm Acronis, believes Equinix should have equipped its servers with redundant cooling systems. Reed noted that, as evident from the cases of DBS Bank and Citibank, incidents are often not isolated events but rather a “series of interconnected events.”
The Minister also expressed some views on Singapore’s “digital-first” policy for the financial market. Consumers and businesses should be aware of the risks associated with paperless currency, and companies should undoubtedly have alternative payment solutions available when servers and applications become unavailable.
