(Nov 6): About 2.5 million Singapore payment and ATM transactions couldn’t be completed during DBS Group Holdings Ltd and Citigroup Inc’s recent outage, causing widespread inconvenience to the city state’s population of almost six million.

Up to 810,000 attempts to access both digital banking platforms were estimated to have failed during the Oct 14 disruption due to a data centre malfunction, Minister of State Alvin Tan said in response to parliamentary questions on Monday. Services had only fully recovered in the early hours of Oct 15.

DBS and Citibank both faced technical issues in recovering their systems, despite having activated their information technology disaster recovery and business continuity plans, Tan said. Specific issues that led to the delays didn’t surface during their annual tests, the minister said.

The Monetary Authority of Singapore last week banned DBS from buying new business ventures for six months, after it had five banking service outages in the last eight months. The lender was also blocked from paring its local branch and ATM network during that time.

The central bank has also raised the maximum fine amount to S$1 million (US$740,200 or RM3.45 million) next year, from the current S$100,000, if financial institutions fail to meet technology risk management requirements.

The government will also study how to further strengthen the security and resilience of data centres, where lapses could result in a significant impact, Tan said.

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