After almost a full day of service disruption, Standard Bank late on Monday said it had finally resolved all technical issues that resulted in downtime on its website, in its smartphone and tablet applications, and in branches and its call centres.

The bank has blamed a “hardware problem” for the downtime.

The bank’s chief executive for personal and business banking Funeka Montjane told TechCentral that the problem was caused by the failure of a power pack in one its servers that stores customer data.

The failure was “so immediate and catastrophic” that the backup server at a remote data centre shut itself down to protect the integrity of customer data. The extended downtime was a result of the time it took to unlock the backup server, she said.

Ironically, the server that failed is due to be replaced at the end of this month, Montjane said.

“Standard Bank takes this matter very seriously as it is important that our customers are able to access all of our services seamlessly and without fail 24/7,” said Montjane in a statement.

“We are truly sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused. We continue to monitor the system closely.”

To cope with the backlog of transactions from customers who were not able to use the bank’s services on Monday, it announced it would extend the operating hours of its branches to 5pm “over the next few days”. — © 2015 NewsCentral Media