Standard Bank is the second large bank to have its Web site fail this month, when a firewall collapsed yesterday, making the site unavailable for a few hours.
Earlier this month, First National Bank's site went down for a few days after an upgrade resulted in excess processing volumes and limited the number of clients who could access the service.
Itumeleng Monale, director of self-service banking at Standard Bank, says the site was not hacked, but went down yesterday afternoon due to a firewall failure. She says the Web site was offline between 14.45 and 15.30, when it started going live again. “It was literally a few hours.”
Monale explains the bank started moving systems to its disaster recovery site as soon as it became aware the firewall had been compromised. She says this meant that services had to go live one-by-one.
Bad timing
Standard Bank has about 930 000 active online clients, and peak online transaction time is between 8.00 and 9.00, and again at lunch time. Afternoons are not peak times; however, about 20 000 clients usually bank online and visit the Web site during the time the site was down.
Monale says the situation was aggravated by the timing of the outage, which was at month-end. She says the disaster recovery plans worked as they were meant to, and the bank is now trying to identify the cause of the firewall failure.
“It doesn't appear to be a hack attack, and none of our systems were compromised,” Monale adds. She apologised to clients who were inconvenienced.
Share