Singapore bank DBS in day two of its biggest tech outage in a decade

Technical problem: Pedestrians walking past a DBS branch in Singapore. The disruption, including to its payments app, is the biggest suffered by the bank since a major glitch in 2010 left customers unable to withdraw cash from ATMs for hours. — Bloomberg

SINGAPORE: DBS Group Holdings Ltd, South-East Asia’s largest bank, faced disruption in its online banking services for the second consecutive day on yesterday, drawing the ire of customers just hours after announcing a fix after the first day of outage.

The disruption, including to its payments app, is the biggest suffered by Singapore’s DBS since a major glitch in 2010 left customers unable to withdraw cash from automated teller machines for hours.

That left the bank subject to central bank supervisory action.

DBS did not elaborate on the cause of the latest disruption yesterday.

“Services were restored early this morning. Unfortunately yesterday’s digital banking issue has recurred and this has affected our services,” DBS said in a post on its Facebook page yesterday.

DBS operates in places including Indonesia, India and Hong Kong, but its biggest retail and wealth management market is at home in Singapore, where it is the market leader in retail banking.

The bank’s Facebook post attracted more than 2,500 comments, with users saying they were unable to log in onto their digital bank accounts, while some asked for compensation.

“How long is this going to take to get it fully restored and running? This is incredibly frustrating when I need to have access to my funds,” said user Nicole Lou.

Another said it was time to move to other banks.

“The downtime is too long. Disappointed. Time to switch Bank. Am expecting DBS to do better than this,” said user Samson Joseph. — Reuters