Thai Bankers Association explains mobile banking outage

The Thai Bankers Association (TBA) has explained that an Internet banking outage between August 31 and September 1 was due to human error, and has made known that six guidelines have been set to ensure the stability of the digital system.

President of Information Technology for the TBA, Somkid Jiranantrat indicated the outage on August 31 was the result of a command error by an agent of Kasikorn Bank. The flawed action was severe enough to eject Kasikorn Bank from the central system shared by the nation’s commercial banks while also impeding the system as a whole. On September 1, over 40,000 erroneous bank transfers were logged at an average rate of 1,000 requests per every nine minutes, again causing the system to shut down.

In eliminate the possibility of such errors, TBA and ITMX, the central network handler, have come out with six guidelines. The first is to increase mobile accommodations two fold to reduce bottle necks during peak hours. The second is more stringent control over changes by individual banks. The third is to double ITMX’s capacity. The fourth is to establish a committee between banks and ITMX, which will set conditions for the temporary ejection of a bank from the system. The fifth is to create a more general interface in monitoring the system and the sixth is to reconsider the nation’s mobile banking structure.

Kasikorn Bank’s mobile banking system can accommodate a maximum 6,000 requests per second with peaks at present hitting only 4,000 requests per second.