ATMs nationwide crashed yesterday morning and were down for two hours, crippling inter-bank transactions, the government-sponsored Financial Information Service Co (FISC) said.
The problem occurred at about 7am due to an error in the information management system in the International Business Machines Co (IBM) mainframe, FISC spokesman Chen Chang-hsiu (陳昌脩) said.
The crash did not affect ATM withdrawals or deposits with cardholders’ banks, but halted transfers of funds between banks via ATMs and online banking services, said the FISC, which is the central operator of such services.
It said cards also could not be used at any ATM other than of the issuing bank.
The FISC and IBM fixed the error and restored all ATM and online banking services by 9am, Chen said.
The problem was not caused by a virus or hacking attack, but by programming errors in FISC’s IBM mainframe, he said, adding that company and IBM were still examining the systems.
The effects on the banking sector were limited because the crash was over the weekend and occurred early in the morning, Chen said.
The FISC is still trying to determine how many inter-bank transactions failed during the two-hour period, he said.
According to the Financial Supervisory Commission, there were 28,771 ATMs nationwide as of June.
In that month, ATMs were used to carry out 73.27 million transactions totaling NT$916.9 billion (US$29.77 billion).
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