DBS, Citi outages caused by cooling system 'technical issue' at data centre
The technical issue with the chilled water system happened during a planned system upgrade at one of Equinix's data centres, raising the temperature in some of the halls and affecting operations.
A POSB ATM displaying an error message in Tampines on Oct 14, 2023. (Photo: CNA)
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.
In a statement on its Facebook page and website on Sunday, redONE said that it started receiving feedback from subscribers about network service issues from 4.30pm on Saturday. Data, call and SMS services were impacted.
The issue was pinpointed to a power outage at an Equinix data centre.
"Our engineers were activated and went on-site immediately to troubleshoot and rectify the issue and begin the restoration process. However, the process took longer than what was initially expected," the statement added.
Mobile services were fully restored at 1am on Sunday.
RedONE added that it was working with vendors to "have a better contingency plan in place to prevent the same thing from happening again".
Equinix's website showed that it has five data centres in Singapore.
While it has data centres globally, Singapore is its regional digital hub for Southeast Asia and functions as the centre for digital exchange.
These five data centres house many international and regional networks that digitally connect the region with the rest of the world, the website stated.
Data centres house servers, storage equipment and powerful computers that need cooling systems in order not to overheat. That may present a challenge in a tropical location like Singapore.
Earlier this year, Microsoft Azure experienced a utility power surge in the Southeast Asia region which tripped a subset of the cooling units in a data centre, taking them offline, according to the Business Times.
Organisations in Singapore such as the Central Provident Fund (CPF) Board, EZ-Link and Nanyang Technological University suffered web service disruptions due to the outage in February, added the report.
