All banking services restored after ‘technical problem’ affected services, says OCBC
OCBC said all its banking services have been restored as at 12.21 pm on Monday (Aug 28).
Earlier on Monday morning, the OCBC mobile app was down for a few hours, with users unable to log in or access any of the bank’s digital services. The bank’s other services, such as ATM withdrawals and card access, were also disrupted.
A message on the app in the morning said it was experiencing “network issues” and that all its banking services were unavailable.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience and are working hard to bring things back to normal,” the message read.
In response to earlier queries from The Business Times, OCBC said that its channels had been impacted by a “technical problem” at 8.33 am, which affected its consumer and business banking customers.
Its ATM, branch and card services were restored first at 10.46 am, while its Internet banking, mobile banking and digital business banking services were restored later, at 12.21 pm.
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Prior to this, the bank said: “Customers can visit these six branches which are currently open – OCBC Centre, Thomson, Sixth Avenue, North Bridge Road, Bukit Batok and Bukit Panjang,” adding that its other branches would open at 11 am.
The bank also said that it would be “on standby to deploy additional resources at branches” and extend branch banking hours to support its customers.
“We apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank our customers for their patience and understanding,” it added. “We would like to assure our customers that no customer data has been compromised and that their monies remain safe.”
The outage comes less than a month after the bank updated its app with a new security feature that locked users out of its services if they have sideloaded apps on their mobile phones.
Users have had to delete such apps, or they would otherwise be unable to log on to OCBC’s digital banking services.
Sideloaded apps refer to those installed from third-party sources outside the official app stores, such as the Google Play Store and Huawei AppGallery.
The app update drew much uproar as users criticised the bank’s move as an invasion of privacy.
In May, DBS ’ online banking and payment services were disrupted for the second time in less than two months, with preliminary investigations linking the cause to human error.
In the wake of the two service disruptions, MAS imposed an additional capital requirement on the bank. The amount for DBS is now a multiple of 1.8 times its risk weighted assets for operational risk, an increase from the multiple of 1.5 times before.
Shares in OCBC closed up 0.8 per cent or S$0.10 on Monday, at S$12.46.
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