Digital Banking

Mizuho ATM outage triggered by digital passbook shift

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March 4, 2021

Mizuho Bank returned over 90% of the 5,244 cash cards and passbooks swallowed up by an ATM glitch last week. The reason for the glitch a bank spokesperson said was the overburdening the bank's computer system, according to a reportby Mizuho Bank.

In January, Mizuho Bank, the core unit of Mizuho Financial Group Inc., began shifting customers from paper passbooks to digital bank account service in an effort to reduce costs and improve user convenience and experience.

However, the digitalization shift put an excessive burden on the bank's computer system which led to the suspension of a large number of its automated teller machines in Japan.

Mizuho Bank planned to complete the data shift work for digital passbooks by early March, but the glitch has forced the bank to reschedule the task. The bank is currently working on transferring data on accounts in which no record of transactions appears on passbooks for more than one year into digital accounts. Mizuho Bank said regular data renewals of some 250,000 cases overlapped the work to transfer data into some 450,000 digital accounts, leading to a capacity shortage at its core computer system.