Nigeria’s largest bank by market capitalisation, Zenith Bank, is facing a total infrastructure shutdown following a fire at its primary data centre.
The bank’s services are affected, leaving millions of customers without access to their accounts.
A security official at one of the bank’s branches confirmed that the network was down, but did not provide further details.
Sources revealed that the downtime started around 7 a.m. after a backup power system caught fire, causing a power cut to the data centre.
Zenith Bank is now trying to switch to its disaster recovery infrastructure to resume all services.
However, the delay in switching to disaster recovery is because not all banking services were running in an active-active deployment.
This means that the services running active-standby must be switched manually.
Despite the delay, the bank expects to have its infrastructure running by the end of the day.
Zenith Bank’s corporate communications department did not respond to TechCabal’s email inquiry, and a communications team member declined to confirm or deny the incident.
The bank has not shared any information with customers on social media or acknowledged the downtime.
UPDATE: Zenith Bank has admitted that there was a fire incident at its storage facility in Victoria Island, Lagos, “which led to a temporary power outage.”
Important Public Notice.#ZenithBank pic.twitter.com/J3CLJvVIYq
— Zenith Bank (@ZenithBank) May 3, 2023
The bank adds that “banking services are being restored as normalcy returns. The inconveniences to our esteemed customers and other stakeholders arising from this incident are highly regretted.”
