Citibank reportedly suffered from an online outage earlier today.
The $1.6 trillion Citibank, used by nearly 200 million customers, had issues with its clients unable to access their online and mobile banking apps, according to the Downdetector website, which publishes the status of outages in real time.
“A limited subset of credit card users were briefly affected by a technology issue that has since been resolved,” a Citi spokesperson told Bank Automation News.
Rising outages
Despite high technology budgets, major financial institutions suffer outages quite often. Citi reported a tech and communication expense of $2.4 billion, up 6% year over year, according to the bank’s earnings report.
According to an April 29 “State of Observability for Financial Services” report published by data analytics and bug detecting company New Relic, nearly half (48%) of financial services and insurance organizations experience costly, high-business-impact outages every week, with a median downtime cost of $2.2 million per hour.
Banking outages this year include:
- $26 billion Arvest Bank suffered an outage this month;
- $196 million Ally Financial suffered an outage in March;
- $3 trillion HSBC suffered an outage in February;
- $2.4 trillion Barclays suffered an outage in February; and
- $487 billion Capital One and FIS suffered an outage in January.
Banks usually suffer outages due to “antiquated systems,” Spencer Kimball, chief executive at New York-based fintech Cockroach Labs, previously told Bank Automation News, adding that banks need to update older systems and have a distributed infrastructure to avoid outages.
Editor’s Note: This is a developing story
