Back in July, DBS Group, the largest bank in Singapore, experienced an outage that lasted seven hours and disrupted banking services at ATMs, branch offices and websites. InformationWeek's Bob Evans describes the run-up to that failure, which reportedly hinged on the use of unapproved procedures by the bank's IT services provider, IBM (NYSE: IBM).

What happened, Evans reports, is that the bank's storage system terminated communications with its mainframe computer in an effort to protect data after a support engineer used an outdated procedure during a cable replacement. As DBS Group CEO Piyush Gupta wrote in a letter to customers following the outage, "a procedural error inadvertently triggered a malfunction in the multiple layers of systems redundancies, which led to the outage."

As Evans points out, much remains unknown about the event, including how--or whether--IBM will compensate DBS. "I would guess that while neither company would comment on whether IBM would be compensating DBS for its role in the crash," Evans writes, "IBM's going to be paying DBS very generously in either cash or extended and comprehensive additional services."

For more:
- see Bob Evan's article at InformationWeek

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