- Yesterday there was a disruption in the online banking of several major banks in Germany. Deutsche Bank, Postbank, Norisbank and Commerzbank were affected.
- Customer login was not possible for hours. According to official information, the cause was a technical malfunction on the Deutsche Bank Group’s shared IT platform.
Between 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., thousands of customers were unable to log into their accounts. Because many customers then tried telephone banking, this quickly became overloaded. However, ATMs and card payments continued to work. However, online transfers, account balance inquiries and app access were blocked. The problem was resolved in the afternoon.
Reason for concern?
Technically speaking, these are central failures – so-called “single points of failure”. They are not absolutely safety-critical, but can still have extremely unpleasant consequences:
Late payments, no access to urgently needed liquidity, missed deadlines. This can be a threat to the existence of companies and self-employed people who rely on real-time payment transactions.
Things become critical when such disruptions occur in combination with security gaps or attacks – for example through DDoS attacks or compromised authentication systems.
Can this also happen with crypto systems?
It can, but not like this. Although blockchain databases are distributed systems, i.e. decentralized both physically and organizationally, many altcoins and L2 networks use central cloud services – and they usually are not.
Many will still remember the outage of Amazon’s AWS cloud on October 19th of this year. Polygon, Base, MetaMask and Coinbase were disrupted for hours.
The incident showed that, despite blockchain technology, many crypto projects depend heavily on central infrastructure – and if that fails, the most beautiful, regularly praised dentralization is of no use. Incidentally, Bitcoin remained largely unaffected – evidence of its robust decentralization.
Failures are possible in both worlds
In classic banking they usually arise from central IT problems, in cryptocurrencies from external infrastructure dependencies and their problems. If you are looking for maximum reliability, you have to pay attention to real decentralization – and to redundant, that is to say, accesses that are implemented in different technical ways. Unfortunately, this is very expensive and that is why it is the exception.
There is an official statement from Deutsche Bank on the current incident. A spokesman for the bank said:
“Access to online accounts of Deutsche Bank, Postbank and Norisbank was temporarily restricted on Monday. The cause was a technical malfunction. The malfunction was resolved in the afternoon. In some cases, a second login attempt may be necessary. We ask customers for their understanding of the inconvenience caused.”
The bank did not disclose any further technical details, but the fact that several banks in the group were affected at the same time clearly points to a key infrastructure problem. According to media reports, the disruption was largely resolved by around 1:30 p.m.
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