Bank blames IBM for outage

Singapore's DBS Bank says a failure on IBM's part to correctly fix an identified instability within the bank's storage system led to the seven-hour service outage on July 5.

In a statement posted on its website addressing its customers, DBS chief executive Piyush Gupta said IBM was carrying out "a routine repair job" to address alert messages that indicated a problem with a component in the disk storage subsystem, which was connected to the bank's mainframe.

The IT vendor's Asia-Pacific team was scheduled to replace the component during off-peak hours, specifically 3am, but an error in how the fix was applied triggered a malfunction in the bank's redundancy systems, leading to the outage.

For more on this story, read iDBS points outage finger at IBM on ZDNet Asia.