Data centre outage sparks banking services blackout across Mexico

Chaos as outage brings majority of Mexico’s banking services offline

A data centre outage caused most of Mexico’s banking services to go down over the weekend, preventing customers from making purchases or using ATMs.

Prosa, an electronic transaction services firm responsible for processing card payments, said an electrical fault at its data centre in Santa Fe, Mexico, was responsible for the outage that affected customers of Banorte, HSBC, Santander, Banjército and others.

Customers were unable to make purchases or withdraw cash using their credit and debit cards for several hours on Saturday. Several Mexican media outlets reported chaos in supermarkets as hapless shoppers were forced to abandon shopping trolleys full of food.

By Saturday night the company reported that the problem had been resolved and that the data centre would come back online early Sunday morning.

“The fault presented in one of our data centres was repaired and most of our services are already working. We continue working to ensure that the services will be fully stabilized in the next few hours,” the company tweeted (translated) Saturday.

The outage comes as the Mexican government attempts to accelerate the adoption of credit and debit cards. The administration is reportedly mooting a ban on the use of cash for tolls and gasoline as part of a wider effort to encourage unbanked Mexicans into the formal economy and to crackdown on money laundering.

Last week, failures in British Airways’s check-in and departures systems forced the airline to cancel more than 100 flights.