Outages at two banks that stopped 2.5 million payment transactions were sparked by a technical issue with the datacenter’s cooling system, according to the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) on Monday.
In fact, according to minister Alvin Tan in a parliamentary reply, the outages led to 810,000 failed attempts to access the two platforms while 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions could not be completed.
Equinix has reportedly blamed a contractor, alleging that person “incorrectly sent a signal to close the valves from the chilled water buffer tanks” during a planned system upgrade.
As a result, the MAS has slapped DBS with some hefty punishments – including barring it over the next six months from reducing the size of its branch and ATM network, making any non-essential IT changes, or acquiring new business ventures.
Singapore-based Acronis CISO Kevin Reed told The Register it was surprising the cooling system was not redundant, as were the banks failed backup plans.
In a LinkedIn post, Reed called it “odd” that such a core system like the handling of authentication for an online bank would be managed by a third-party provider.
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