SARAH BULLEN, Johannesburg | Friday 3.30pm.
PANDEMONIUM broke out in ABSA Bank branches nationwide on Friday morning when thousands of the new-look bank’s customers were denied access to their finances.
A well-placed source in ABSA head office told ZA*NOW that the bank had a complete system crash on Thursday night, leaving it unable to process any client information. Unfortunately the system failure came at month-end, when the majority of South African firms make salary payments, leaving thousands without recognition of salary payment.
Absa business systems division GM Dr Maarten Venter said the problem, which is “very rare”, impacted on the system hardware, largely scotching rumours of hacking. He said that should the disc controller fail, as it did on Thursday night, there is a chance that the failure will impact on data.
In this instance banks have an emergency shut-down and launch a formal recovery procedure, he said. While the recovery procedure should be completed by Friday afternoon, the process of updating the backlog of account transactions will run well into the weekend, with staff on call-up to rectify the problem.