SINGAPORE — A long-awaited date with her national serviceman boyfriend for Ms Nazrana Shaheen ended up being cut short, no thanks to a
Experts said while more can be done to prevent outages, there are no foolproof methods to ensure they won't happenSINGAPORE — A long-awaited date with her national serviceman boyfriend for Ms Nazrana Shaheen ended up being cut short, no thanks to a “The recent service disruption has definitely changed my opinion on the reliability of e-payments, especially DBS because this is not the first time I've encountered such a disruption from the company,” she added.
Both Ms Nazrana and Ms Nadya posted TikTok videos on Oct 14 about their experience of the banking outage, which have since garnered over 44,000 and 220,000 views respectively. The disruption saw banking services by DBS Bank and Citibank being down from the afternoon of Oct 14 — a Saturday — due to an issue at the data centre used by both banks.
Screenshots showing the DBS digital banking service page and PayLah! service being down on Oct 14, 2023. The D-SIBs are DBS Bank, OCBC, United Overseas Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Citibank, The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation and Malayan Banking Berhad. However, they also caution that offline payment applications come with their own set of challenges for both businesses and consumers.
“We had a beeline of customers whose DBS and Citibank-issued cards didn’t work. We restarted our devices, checked the connection, and nothing worked. Then we saw the notification from the news and realised there was an outage.”“No one on the island knew that there was a DBS outage as they do not have connection on certain parts of the island, specifically in my store, and our store's wireless connection is unstable.
“We requested them to leave us a direct message on Instagram, including a photo of their items and the total price. Our part-timer also recorded down all the Instagram handles who owed us the payment as it would be easier for us to keep track and tally the sales,” she said. “Once customers realised the payments weren’t working they swapped to another card that worked, so we’re lucky that there were other banks or credit card providers that weren’t affected.”Hello Arigato has four outlets across Singapore that accept only cashless modes of payments. Mr Colin Chen, founder of the cafe, said that its business was largely unaffected during the banking services disruption as customers used cards from other banks or opted to pay via GrabPay, an e-wallet.