Our Esteemed Stakeholders,
First, I sincerely apologize for last week’s negative experience and thank you for your patience.
The interruptions began on July 6 due to a technical problem in our bank's main computer. Thanks to the hard work of our IT team and technology business partners, we fixed the issue on the evening of July 7. All our systems have been serving our customers without any interruptions since then.
Technology is at the core of our bank's strategies in which we continue to make significant investments. Our core banking application runs on the IBM Mainframe system, also used by many large banks around the world. Our bank uses what is technically called a redundant infrastructure, which refers to the duplication of critical components of a system such as ours with the intention of increasing its reliability. Our infrastructure consists of two main systems (“active-active” in technical terms) which are synchronized with each other (as well as a secondary data centre in Izmir). Commissioned in 2020 and housed at the Akbank Data Centre, this dual main system runs on the leading international standard known as a Tier III architecture, which is the predominant software architecture for traditional client-server applications.
I would now like to share with you transparently the unfortunate series of events we experienced despite our leading technology:
- On the morning of Tuesday July 6th, a problem occurred in our main banking system database and disk management system. It affected all our channels and caused repetitive outages.
- We immediately began investigations to identify and resolve the problem aided by our technology business partner as well as Turkish and international experts.
- Even though a number of our services came back online, interruptions resumed.
- Therefore, on Wednesday, July 7, at 7.30 am, having made a number of configurations, we decided to restart the database and the disk systems. This continued throughout the day.
- This daylong process was carried out with great care and attention in order to avoid having to repeat it again. In the meantime, we were unable to provide any of our banking services.
- At 19:15 on the same day, our systems gradually began to come back online and by 23:55, all our services were in operation. The entire system had been restored.
- On Thursday, July 8th, one and a half times the normal amount of transactions were processed, and our system operated at its usual high performance level.
- This system outage was not due to any sort of cyber-attack and our customers’ personal data remains fully secure and intact.
During this difficult process, all of our colleagues and business partners worked hard to minimise interruptions to our customers. Unfortunately, it took a long time to fix the problem.
The troubles experienced by our customers during this time are a source of great sadness for me and all my colleagues. We quickly put into effect mitigatory packages, which you can access on our website.
In an environment where technology dependency has become inevitable, problems similar to the ones we experienced can unfortunately occur in many institutions around the world. From the beginning of the process communication is as important as resolving the problem. Of course, we have learned important lessons from what happened. We are ready to share these with our industry, although we hope that institutions like us, which have focused on technology, change and development, and adopted transparent communication with their customers and stakeholders, will never experience such situations.
The bond of mutual trust between our bank and its customers goes back many years, and the strength of this bond becomes even more apparent in challenging times. I cannot thank our customers enough for making us feel that they are with us at all times.
I would like to take this opportunity to extend my sincere thanks to the invaluable institutions and representatives of the banking and finance sector, especially the BRSA, CBRT, CMB, our investors, our business partners, and our dedicated employees, for their close support and attention throughout the entire ordeal.
Our bank, which has been aiming to serve its customers with its sound financials and a people-oriented banking approach for 73 years, will continue to offer the best banking experience by building on the lessons of this event.
Best Regards,
Hakan Binbaşgil
CEO, Akbank