In a parliamentary reply on the 19 March 2026 DBS and POSB digital banking disruption, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) set out its supervisory expectations on system resilience and reported that investigations have identified the root cause of the outage. MAS reiterated that banks are expected to limit unscheduled downtime for critical systems to four hours for any rolling 12-month period and to restore services swiftly and safely when outages occur. DBS Bank’s disruption lasted about one hour from 12.03 pm to 1.19 pm, preventing customers from viewing deposit balances and some customers from making payments through digital channels, while ATMs, credit cards and NETS debit cards remained accessible. Investigations found the outage was caused by an erroneous step during a system change, and MAS will follow up with DBS Bank to strengthen its change management process.
Monetary Authority of Singapore 2026-04-08
Monetary Authority of Singapore links DBS digital banking disruption to erroneous system change and reiterates four-hour downtime expectation
The Monetary Authority of Singapore, in a parliamentary reply on the 19 March 2026 DBS and POSB digital banking disruption, outlined its supervisory expectations on system resilience and confirmed that investigations identified the root cause. MAS reiterated that banks must limit unscheduled downtime for critical systems to four hours over any rolling 12-month period and restore services swiftly and safely, and will follow up with DBS Bank to strengthen its change management process after an erroneous step during a system change caused the outage.