Standard Bank has blamed its latest systems outage on the failure of a component responsible for processing card and ATM transactions and switching them from external devices into the bank’s internal systems.
Africa’s biggest lender by assets suffered a six-hour systems outage on Saturday, leaving thousands of customers unable to swipe their cards at point-of-sale devices or draw cash from ATMs. Upset customers took to social media to voice their frustration, with many threatening to change banks after they were left stranded at airports, restaurants and till points.
This latest systems crash prompted Lungisa Fuzile, CEO of the bank’s SA operations, and Khomotso Molabe, its chief engineering officer for SA, to host a media call on Tuesday. While the bank could not immediately provide an estimate of the value of lost transactions or exactly how many customers had been affected, it acknowledged that the number probably ran into the “thousands”.
“We are exceedingly mindful that when our systems are down, when people’s ability to transact on our platform is constrained, the impact is huge ... it is pervasive,” Fuzile told journalists. “The best thing we can do is to humble ourselves before you and apologise.”
Molabe explained that at about 7.30am on Saturday, Standard Bank experienced a “degradation” of one of the components responsible for switching transactions related to card payments into the bank. By about 9am, the problem had become so severe that the majority of its customers were unable to transact, including business clients who could not process payments.
“It’s a component loosely called [a] generic switch,” said Molabe. “This particular component that failed is also responsible for getting our ATMs to work. [But] as I acknowledge this failure of this particular component, I also want to emphasise its resilience. It was the first time that we have ever seen this type of failure on this component, at least in the last four years.”
Molabe said Standard Bank’s engineers performed “a lot of heroics” to restore services by rebuilding the affected systems architecture and deploying it to assist customers. The bank’s systems were restored by late Saturday afternoon.
“When the engineers observed that this component had a problem, they literally went through a process of rebuilding the architecture across this whole environment,” he said.
Fuzile echoed Molabe’s praise for the engineers, saying he took “a lot of pride” that they were able to determine “in a matter of hours” that trying to fix the problem in the bank’s old systems architecture would not work. This led them to make the call to rebuild the affected architecture, a call that he said had never been made before.
“Up to now, that recreated environment is still providing a seamless service to our customers. Of course, one touches wood as one says that.”
Molabe also said the latest crash in the bank’s services was unrelated to the three other “high-impact” incidents that had occurred in recent months, because those were due to a software bug.
“Those three incidents were in no way related to this one,” he said. “We worked very, very closely with a lot of our partners to make sure that bug is fixed.”
Ironically, the systems outages that have plagued Standard Bank in 2022 come at a time when it is punting its transformation from a financial services group to what it likes to call a digital platforms-based services provider.
Yet, despite these big digital ambitions, Standard Bank failed to notify clients through text message that its systems had crashed on Saturday morning.
Asked why Standard Bank had failed to do this, Fuzile told journalists that the bank could not push “zillions” of text messages through its systems simultaneously.
“We can cause yet another problem inadvertently,” he said.
Confidence
Molabe said that while Standard Bank had a good degree of confidence that it would see improvements in the resilience of its systems, it cannot rule out future crashes.
Nevertheless, he said, the bank was taking steps to mitigate the potential impact on clients. “All our engineers in the organisation are working around the clock to make sure that we can continue to minimise any impact in the event that we have technical glitches,” said Molabe.
Standard Bank ruled out compensation for affected customers, saying it was difficult to attach a rand value to the frustration experienced by its customers.
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