DBS, Citi outages caused by cooling system ‘technical issue’ at data centre

SINGAPORE: The hours-long outage for banking and payment services in Singapore over the weekend was due to a technical issue with the cooling system – which uses chilled water – at a data centre, Equinix told CNA on Monday (Oct 16). 

The outage on Saturday, which caused DBS and Citibank banking and payment services to go offline, happened after a planned system upgrade at one of Equinix’s data centres in Singapore, a spokesperson said. 

“This raised the temperatures in some of the halls in the data centre and impacted some customer’s operations,” she added. 

The issue has been resolved and data centre provider Equinix is in contact with affected clients, which also include mobile services provider redONE. 

CNA has contacted Equinix for more details on its investigation into the technical issue. 

The outage started at about 3pm on Saturday, with the Downdetector website showing a spike in reports about DBS and Citibank. 

DBS services – including DBS/POSB digibank, DBS PayLah! and ATM banking – were disrupted. Meanwhile, Citibank services including the use of Citi Credit Cards, PayNow and investments via the Citi mobile app or Citibank Online were also affected. 

Both said on Sunday that services were restored.