Wednesday, September 21, 2011

CEO, David Conner, explains OCBC's system outage on 13 Sep 2011


As the holder of one OCBC Visa card, I received this email from OCBC yesterday evening on behalf of the good man.






Dear Customer,

I owe you an explanation of what caused our systems to go down last week along with an update as to where we are now.

Since cutting over to our back-up system mid-day on Tuesday, 13 September, our information technology team focused their efforts on identifying the root cause of the technical problem which caused our banking channels to go down from 9:00 am for more than three hours - services were restored progressively from 12.20 pm and were fully operational by 1.00 pm. Our team was determined to find and fix the problem so as to ensure there would be no repeat channel outage.

After reviewing several possible causes, the team isolated a network device that did not function well. This device acted in combination with a parameter setting in the main banking system to trigger a suspension of the system’s network communications. This situation in turn affected our ATM network, branches, and internet and mobile banking channels island wide.

Our team took the time to identify the fault, simulate it and repeat the simulation to confirm that they had indeed identified the exact cause of the technical problem. This deliberate process was followed so as to ensure that we rectified the problem correctly and, in so doing, would prevent any future recurrence.

After implementing the repair, our team tested our main system thoroughly to ensure that it was working well and then returned our technology operations from our backup system to our main system over this past weekend.

The service outage did not meet our commitment of having our channels operating for you at all times. This is unacceptable. Again, I apologize for any inconvenience that this incident caused you.

I am grateful for your patience and understanding during the time our systems were down and thank you for banking with OCBC.
Yours sincerely

David Conner, CEO



Who could hold a grudge against OCBC with such a letter written? Perhaps it was easy for me to say as I was not affected by the downtime at all, however he was sincere and admitted to the company's mistake to the point he knew it was unacceptable. Let's hope that such a incident will not happen again or it would definately tarnish OCBC's trust and David Conner's name.

Anyone out there affected by the OCBC downtime in Singapore?

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

One of my newest favorite sites to find information on Wushu - www.singaporewushu.com