DBS, Citi resume banking services following earlier outage

SINGAPORE: DBS and Citibank said that their banking services were back to normal on Sunday (Oct 15) after an outage hit both banks on Saturday afternoon. 

For DBS, these services include DBS/POSB digibank and DBS PayLah!, which were affected by the disruption.

DBS said: "However, any customer who may still experience difficulties logging into their accounts via their mobile app can try to log in with digibank online/ internet banking using SMS OTP.

"We are also aware that some of our customers’ PayNow/FAST transactions were interrupted when the disruption happened, and will be processing these with utmost priority."

It added that it will update customers on the status of these transactions. 

In response to CNA's queries on Sunday, Citibank said that all its banking services have been restored. 

"We understand the disruption caused issues with performing banking activities such as services on our ATMs, using our Citi Credit Cards, PayNow, and investments via the Citi Mobile App or Citibank Online," said a Citi spokesperson.

"We also apologise to customers who were unsuccessful in reaching our Citiphone staff."

DBS had said on Saturday that the service disruption was caused by an issue at a data centre that is also used by various other organisations.

The data centre provider, Equinix, said in an update on Sunday: "A technical issue occurred at one of our data centres in Singapore that raised the temperatures in the data centre and impacted some customers' operations." 

It added that it is conducting a "thorough investigation" into the incident.

Complaints from customers started streaming in on Saturday afternoon, after they found that they could not access online and mobile banking services.

DBS ATMs were also affected by the disruption, with error messages on the machines saying: "This terminal is temporarily offline."

The Downdetector website, which tracks service disruptions, showed a spike in reports about DBS and Citibank from about 3pm on Saturday.

DBS subsequently posted an apology on Facebook, saying it had reopened all branches - except the ones in Tampines Central, Tampines One and White Sands - while it worked to address the issue.

It also assured its customers that its systems were not compromised.

Citibank told CNA that it experienced a "temporary outage" in its banking services and had started progressively restoring services. 

Downdetector also showed spikes on Saturday in reports for WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, among others.

Some people on social media said they face problems using Meta's social media platforms. Users in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Indonesia, India and the United Arab Emirates posted on X to say they could not get on WhatsApp.

This is not the first disruption to hit DBS’ online banking and payment services.

After two disruptions in the space of about two months earlier this year, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) in May imposed on DBS an additional capital requirement. 

In May, DBS CEO Piyush Gupta apologised for the disruptions and said that a special board committee review would be completed "as a matter of utmost priority".