Who wants to pay by card needs a connection to a server. However, in Singapore, it did not work for half a day. More than 2.5 million people could not pay their bills.
Those who are on the go and want to pay a bill by card outside need a connection to the corresponding servers at the terminal. Your data is forwarded to a server with information about the respective bank to authorize or decline the payment.
But this went wrong a few weeks ago in Singapore, because an employee reportedly disabled the water cooling of the system. By the way, Citibank and DBS Bank were affected. The latter is considered the largest bank in Southeast Asia.
Disabled water cooling brings down bank data servers
What was the problem? According to a parliamentary hearing, the incident occurred on October 14 due to a problem in the cooling system of a data center provided by an external vendor for the banks. This is reported by colleagues from xataka.com. The temperature rose so much that the servers were automatically switched off to prevent damage.
The cause of the overheating of the infrastructure was allegedly the transmission of a wrong parameter during a routine update. EQUINIX, the company that owns the data centers, stated that an employee of a contractor accidentally closed the valves of the water tanks of the temperature control system, thus disabling the water cooling.
What happened next? The two banks, Citibank and DBS, then experienced connection issues with the servers. In the end, there were 810,000 failed attempts to access the banking platforms, and 2.5 million people could not complete their transactions.
A follow-up is also expected: The government accused the banks of not properly securing the critical payment systems, thus violating an important policy. Now, they intend to impose a fine on the banks.
Other banks also have it tough. One crypto bank supposedly lacks a billion euros, and this affects German investors. Who is specifically affected can be read directly on MeinMMO:
