OCBC restores all services after facing ‘network issues’ on Monday morning

Netizens reported having problems - ranging from bill payments to public transport - using the bank’s services from about 9.30am. PHOTO: ST READER

SINGAPORE – All of OCBC Bank’s services have been restored, following “network issues” that led to an outage of its services on Monday morning.

Earlier in the day, the bank said in a Facebook post that its mobile and online banking, PayNow, ATMs, Velocity – the bank’s digital business banking platform – and cards were down because of “technical problems”, and that customers could visit OCBC branches for urgent transactions.

The Facebook post was amended at about 12.25pm to say: “We have restored all our banking services... We thank our customers for their patience and understanding. We want to assure them that their monies remained safe and customer data was secured throughout.

“We are investigating the cause of the technical problem and will provide an update as soon as we can.”

When contacted in the morning, OCBC said the outage began at around 8.30am, and that the bank was “on standby to deploy additional resources at branches and extend branch banking hours to support our customers”.

Netizens reported having problems using the bank’s services – ranging from paying of bills to public transport fares – from about 9.30am.

The bank then said in two Facebook updates at about 10.30am and 10.40am that card and branch services, as well as ATM services, had been restored.

Ms Samantha Shum said she tried accessing mobile banking services at around 10.45am but was still unable to log in to her account.

The 23-year-old, who works in the real estate sector, said: “I’m not worried because the outages usually resolve quite quickly and I have other bank accounts. But people who use only OCBC are probably more frustrated.”

On Monday evening, the Monetary Authority of Singapore said that it was “following up with the bank on the root cause of the incident and will take supervisory follow-up actions as needed”.

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