Denmark's Danske Bank Group is to pay compensation to customers after routine maintenance sparked a one-week shut down of its IT systems, disrupting payments and closing down Internet banking services.
Danske Bank has been experiencing problems with its IT systems since Monday, 10 March. The bank says it is currently processing large volumes of data, but payments and transactions made this week still can't be viewed in invidivdual accounts.
In a statement, Danske Bank says it is analysing the cause of the systems break down and expects all updates to be completed by Monday morning, 17 March.
"As a consequence of the IT problems, Danske Bank expects to have to pay compensation to a number of customers," continues the bank. "This will take place in co-operation with the individual customers."
The outage is believed to have occured when a power unit in an IBM Enterprise Storage Server had to be replaced. During this process, the storage system went down afflicting data recovery from the bank's IBM DB2 databases, which are used to run a centralised back office for all the bank's operations.
A similar crash back in November 2002 caused a lock-out of the bank's e-banking operations. IBM reputedly paid an eight-figure sum in kroner to the bank by way of compensation. The latest failures could cost the supplier even more.