Zenith Bank, the largest bank in Nigeria based on market capitalization, has left millions of customers in a difficult situation as they are facing a complete infrastructure outage due to a fire that broke out in their main data center. The outage is affecting the bank’s services, and at a branch, a security official informed a customer that the network was down without giving any additional details.
Several sources have reported that there was a downtime that started at approximately 7 a.m. One of the sources confirmed that the incident was caused by a backup power system catching fire, which resulted in a power outage at the data center. According to sources familiar with the situation, Zenith Bank is presently endeavoring to transition to its disaster recovery infrastructure to restore all services.
According to a source that spoke with TechCabal, the reason for the delay in transitioning to the disaster recovery infrastructure is related to the fact that not all banking services were operating in an active-active deployment. Consequently, the services currently running in active-standby mode must be manually switched over. The source stated that the bank anticipates having its infrastructure operational before the end of the day, despite the delay.
While it is customary for major organizations to have disaster recovery protocols in place, Zenith Bank was unable to execute its recovery infrastructure. The bank’s statement indicates that the fire incident took place at a storage facility and assures that banking services are now in the process of being restored. However, the bank has not confirmed that the fire indeed occurred at its data centre.
This incident is likely to reignite discussions about the viability of moving banking infrastructure to the cloud. Although some argue that this may not entirely resolve issues with reliability, it could potentially mitigate the risk of prolonged downtimes resulting from unforeseen events.
