For financial institutions like banks, any form of an outage is simply unacceptable. Thousand of consumers rely on the bank’s digital services and were left fuming as transactions and online banking matters could not work.

CAN LEGACY BANKS STAY RELEVANT WITH BANKING AS A SERVICE?

Aaron Raj | 16 August, 2021

According to a report by The Straits Times, the disruption began on Tuesday morning as stated by outage monitoring website Downdetector. While the bank was able to sort the problem, the outage occurred again the next day, resulting in almost 15 hours of outage.

In a video message to customers, DBS Singapore Country Head Shee Tse Koon provided an update on the disruption in the bank’s digital banking services. “We have since been working round the clock, together with our third-party engineering providers, to fix the problem.”

As one of Southeast Asia’s largest banks, DBS Bank is known for using new technologies in its financial systems. It recently announced that its digital asset ecosystem, anchored by the DBS Digital Exchange, has enjoyed strong business momentum since it went operational 24/7 in August this year. DBS also recorded over SGD 600 million in digital assets under custody as of the end of October, triple the amount recorded in the previous month.

(Photo by ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP)

The bank also announced that it will invest SGD300 million next year to grow the breadth and depth of its digital and Intelligent Banking capabilities powering all products and solutions for wealth and retail customers. The investment will go towards enhancing tech infrastructure and talent, embedding Intelligent Banking predictive technology in more financial solutions to better empower self-directed customers, and scaling the bank’s capabilities across both online and offline touchpoints across the region.

While the bank outage has been resolved, the reality is, outages can happen. The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) said it will consider taking “supervisory action” on DBS for the disruption, Reuters reported.

“This is a serious disruption and the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) expects DBS to conduct a thorough investigation to identify the root causes and implement the necessary remedial measures,” Marcus Lim, an assistant managing director from the banking and insurance team at MAS, said in a statement.

 Dealing with bank outage

To understand more about the bank’s outage, Tech Wire Asia caught up with Kevin Reed, Acronis CISO, and Alex Ivanyuk, Acronis Technology Director. Both of them explained how the bank could have dealt with the issue.

“For a renowned bank, like DBS, to have some services down for more than 24 hours – with none of the services available at some point – is quite unacceptable. In my experience of technical firefights, the worst-case scenario is recognized fairly quickly. Given how long it takes to resolve this issue (still being resolved), they may be still trying to locate the problem,” said Kevin.

Since DBS hasn’t shared much info about what happened, Kevin thinks the issue could be with their authentication systems. It’s hard for him to tell, but a system upgrade or some external event could be causing a significant overload of the authentication platform, leading to its malfunctioning. Many users have reported the issue, the access is sporadic, signs of an overload. Many similar events happened in the past, DDoS attacks are often the cause of system overload and not responding to legitimate user requests.

Kevin also pointed out that in the 21st century, banks need to modernize their infrastructure with advanced technology, including cyber protection – having a capable tech team helps achieve just that and be on top of the problem.

“As per stated on their website: “maintenance for Services involving foreign exchange is scheduled daily from 5am-6am”. Running scheduled maintenance that can possibly cause downtime – it’s simply not done in our day. Many sites have figured out how to upgrade without disrupting the operations by now,” added Kevin.

For Alex, this is not the best example of crisis handling. Not only the bank services were down, but customer support functions also weren’t working, and there was no announcement on any public DBS channel until hours later.

“That being said, in my experience, no bank is much better at that – and DBS is not the first bank to face such issues. Banks are known to still use outdated, legacy systems – especially if they were founded long ago. Large US banks are known to use COBOL and mainframes, but they are not exactly technological power horses, to say the least,” noted Alex.

Alex also commented that it’s not just the banking industry that can have outages. Transportation, telecom to some extent, manufacturing, industrial (like plants, various controls, etc), even military – many of them still rely on legacy systems, which poses a problem internally (to employees) and externally (to customers). This also makes them exposed to cybersecurity threats.

The post DBS Bank suffers worst outage in a decade   appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The outage led to tens of thousands of users in the countries facing difficulties with booking their rides, with the company saying it faced a technical issue with its app, TodayOnline reported.

The Singapore-based company first announced problems faced by the app at about 8.30am on Thursday but some rides only accepted cash payments.

GRAB AND SINGAPORE AIRLINES WANT TO TAKE YOU FROM THE SKIES TO THE STREETS

Tech Wire Asia | 6 October, 2017

“Currently, we are working hard to improve it and our app will be back online soon,” the company said in its Grab Malaysia and Grab Indonesia Twitter accounts.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to serve you again soon!”

On Facebook, Grab also said: “Our engineers are already looking into this and we expect to be back up in 30 minutes.”

Despite the assurance, some users reported being unable to use the service an hour after the Facebook posting. However, most were able to call for drivers and use GrabPay-linked cards apart from cash.

Singapore’s The Independent reported the glitch caused GrabPay credits in the GrabPay mobile wallet payment system to disappear from customer’s accounts.

Ride prices continued to surge on the app despite the glitch and commuters in Singapore also faced problems with the train line due to a signal fault, causing delays during the morning peak hours.

The glitch caused GrabPay credits in the GrabPay mobile wallet payment system to disappear from customer’s accounts. Source: Shutterstock

“Hello grab! I already put money in my credits last night and now I can’t get to work!” Facebook user Marr Sakiynah R Giri wrote,

Another Singaporean Facebook user slammed Grab for its surge prices amid the breakdown.

GRAB’S INVESTMENT IN SINGAPORE’S OBIKE A SIGN THE MARKET IS SHIFTING

Tech Wire Asia | 28 September, 2017

“My wallet credits are all gone! Is this supposed to be normal? S$42 instead of the usual S$14. Is Grab capitalising on such an opportunity?”

At about 10.30am, Grab said all of its services and credits were fully restored.

The post Grab’s rush-hour outage struck thousands of users in Southeast Asia appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

“WhatsApp users around the world experienced a brief outage today that has now been resolved”, a WhatsApp spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.

There was no intention to start my new year by complaining but hey @WhatsApp you are severely down and all the Indian aunties and uncles are getting frustrated. #whatsappisdown

— Vishwa[jeet] Srivastava (@vishwajeets3) December 31, 2017

The cause of the outage, about an hour long, was not immediately known.

In India, its biggest market with about 200 million of its billion-plus users, and counting. The app was down just a few minutes past midnight into the new year, but many users in the country found themselves unable to send new year wishes to their friends and family creating a lot of confusion and chaos.

When #WhatsappIsDown and people actually have to talk to fellow humans. ? pic.twitter.com/uA0IwzvQSX

— Israel Nava (@izzy_film) December 31, 2017

The reason behind the outage, according to NDTV, was possibly due to the heavy usage of the app to send in New Year greetings to family and friends.

During the outage, users could send messages, but the recipients did not receive the texts. This is shown on the single grey tick on the side of each message and the absence of a double blue tick, despite the Internet connections of both the sender and receiver working perfectly.

Never get dependent on Technology as they said.. So first Lesson of Year #2018 and yes Wish you all a Happy new year… #Whatsappisdown #Happynewyear #WhatsApp

— Ambikesh Kumar (@Ambiikesh) December 31, 2017

Some users received notifications that read: “Our service is experiencing a problem right now. We are working on it and hope to restore functionality shortly. Sorry for the inconvenience.”

WHAT’S UP WITH THE WHATSAPP BUTTON ON YOUR FACEBOOK APP?

Tech Wire Asia | 25 September, 2017

Angered and confused by the outage, many users took to social media to express their frustrations, coming up with hashtags like #WhatsAppisdown, #WhatsAppstoppedworking which became trending on Twitter. Other users took the opportunity to post some hilarious memes.

Users in other countries also complained of outages on social media.

Additional reporting by Reuters

The post India’s 200m users might have caused WhatsApp’s New Year outage appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.