News

ICBC outage rattles China

June 24, 2013

Amid mounting anxiety about a potential "full-fledged crisis" over Chinese banking system liquidity, one of China's largest FIs, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, experienced a paralyzing outage of ATM, over-the-counter, Internet and mobile banking services on Sunday. Even the ChinaPay network was affected in some areas.

According to The Epoch Times, citizens began posting worriedly on the Chinese version of Twitter, Sina Weibo. "It's happening," said nanjibing9. "The real estate bubble is about to burst." 

Another user, Wosiguwozai1971, questioned the official line that the outage was related to a system upgrade at the bank. "Upgrading? If only. Could it be that they're out of X?" ("X" apparently standing in for "money" on the heavily censored service.

In fact, ICBC had announced that it would be suspending service shortly after midnight for about an hour-and-a-half. However, whether upgrade-related or not, the outage occurred several hours later, at around 10:30 a.m.

The state-run television network downplayed the incident, which it said lasted for 45 minutes. However, Epoch Times reported that social network postings indicated that it may have lasted somewhat longer than that.

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