Mizuho Financial Group President Tatsufumi Sakai said Monday that Mizuho Bank had taken seven hours to identify the cause of a system failure in February that shut down thousands of the megabank's ATMs.
Sakai spoke during a Tokyo press conference announcing measures to prevent a reoccurrence of Mizuho Bank's four system failures between Feb. 28 and March 12.
"Not only the system itself, but also there were various problems in system development and operations," Sakai said.
In response to the system failures, the group announced that the crisis management office head, concurrently in charge of other duties, will be dedicated to crisis response and providing for contingencies.
During the Feb. 28 system failure, 4,318 Mizuho Bank ATMs were offline. In many cases ATM cards and passbooks were stuck inside the machines. The group said it took about seven hours to identify the cause of the problem because Mizuho Bank failed to detect an error caused by a system update for fixed deposit accounts.
Regarding the system failure that caused delays in remittances in foreign currencies mainly for corporate customers from the night of March 11 to March 12, the group explained that it took about seven hours to recover from the failure because Hitachi, Ltd., which provided the data equipment that failed, had no system established for prompt system recovery. The group added, however, that there was also an error on the bank's part in the steps it took for the recovery operation.
At the end of March, Mizuho Bank filed a report on the cases to the Financial Services Agency, which plans a detailed investigation through on-site inspections and may impose strict measures such as business improvement orders.
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