The South African operations of Standard Bank, one of Afrika's largest banks by footprint, were disrupted starting on Sunday, 8 May 2022. Their banking app, ATMs, debit, and credit card services were all affected by an outage.
The blackout started around 12:00 on Sunday, 8 May 2022, until around 17:00. At the time of publishing, some of the bank's services were still not fully functional.
“We are sorry that you are not able to access our Banking App, Internet Banking, USSD or transact with Credit Cards, Point of Sale (POS) and ATMs,” Standard Bank said in a statement.
[2/2] Please use your Debit Card to transact in the interim. We are working urgently to fix this issue and sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused. https://t.co/AN4BJ3mtyq
— Standard Bank ZA (@StandardBankZA) May 8, 2022
Maximum Tolerable Downtime
The Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) is a worldwide guideline that determines how many times an online service can be unavailable per year. The standard aspires for a yearly uptime of 99.9% for online services.
Using the formula, maximum allowable downtime = recovery time objective (RTO) + work recovery time (WRT), 8 hours and 45 minutes of website downtime per year is the standard of deviation that is tolerated.
We will be monitoring the situation with regard to Standard Bank's systems and updating our readers and followers through our social media channels and updating this article.
— By Bataung Qhotsokoane
