It was a “generic switch” which caused Standard Bank’s system to crash early on Saturday morning, leaving thousands of its customers unable to pay for fuel pumped into their tanks or groceries scanned at supermarket pay points.
“We want to take ownership of what happened and express our heartfelt and most sincere apology for the inconvenience and indignity we caused our clients,” said CEO Lungisa Fuzile at a hastily convened virtual media briefing on Tuesday.
The failure of that key switch component meant all transactions, including those at ATMs, failed from about 7.30am until early afternoon, the busiest shopping hours of the week.
“By 9am most of our customers couldn’t transact,” Fuzile said.
For those who suffered in monetary terms, there is a process to repay the harm we have done.
— Lungisa Fuzile, Standard Bank CEO
Asked to quantify the impact of the crash in terms of “lost” transactions, he and his colleagues would only say thousands of customers were affected.
Unable to pay for goods or services by card or draw cash from an ATM, many Standard Bank customers found themselves in awkward situations.
“My child is having her hair braided at the salon,” @arleneL tweeted. “Are they going to keep her until I pay for the weave?”
“An SMS would be nice instead of embarrassing yourself in the shops with a card declining,” said Rohan Barnard.
“Not again,” tweeted Standard Bank client Sinethemba Nogude.
“Stuck at OR Tambo, I can’t load my Gautrain card. When will this be fixed or am I stuck here indefinitely? That’s it, I’m changing banks next week!” tweeted another disgruntled customer.
On the issue of individually notifying clients of the system failure, Fuzile said sending “zillions” of SMSes to all clients could have caused another capacity problem.
“But we will find an effective way of getting outage alerts quickly to all our customers,” he said.
Asked whether Standard Bank would compensate those who suffered financial loss as a direct result of Saturday’s system fail, Fuzile said while one could not attach a rand value to the disappointment and indignity of not being able to make payment, “for those who suffered in monetary terms, there is a process to repay the harm we have done”.
The bank’s chief engineering officer, Khomotso Molabe, stressed that Saturday’s outage was unrelated to several others experienced in recent months.
His team of engineers, realising the problem couldn’t be fixed, rebuilt and tested the transaction “architecture” within four hours, Fuzile said, calling their actions “heroic”.
Molabe said the bank was working hard on improving its technological capability.
“We continue to hire engineers in amazing numbers,” he said
Asked if Standard Bank customers could expect the bank’s app to fail on Wednesday, as it has done several times on payday, Fuzile said the bank was confident there would be fewer service disruptions in future.
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