Power surge? No need to panic, says FNB

There is nothing sinister about the massive power surge experienced by FNB this week.

The bank’s chief information officer, Raj Makanjee, said Tuesday’s power failure, which resulted in the interruption of the bank’s computer system, could be attributed to a fault in the mains supply.

“We are awaiting a report from our electrical contractors. The surge occurred on municipal mains supply to the processing centre,” he said.

While the surge – which FNB chief executive Michael Jordaan said was equivalent to eight times the strength of a typical lightning strike – was unprecedented for the bank, Makanjee said no fraudulent activity was suspected.

However, Eskom spokeswoman Hilary Joffe, begged to differ: “Apparently this can not be right. If this were to happen, which we haven’t heard of, everyone would have had their appliances burned out.”

On Tuesday afternoon FNB’s online and electronic banking services were unavailable for more than an hour after the outage in Randburg.

Jordaan said the problem was caused when the back-up power supply failed to kick in, adding that the back-up system was running smoothly later that evening.

The bank’s system, said Makanjee, was fully restored on Wednesday.

Apologising to their customers who were inconvenienced, Makanjee said some downtime on Tuesday and Thursday might have resulted in additional bank charges to some of their customers.

“We will automatically reimburse additional bank charges incurred where our customers were forced to use other bank’s ATMs due to our ATMs not being available.”

No one was available to comment from the banking ombudsman at the time of going to print. - Saturday Star