1Link, Pakistan’s largest payment gateway and switch system, has restored services that caused an outage of Inter Bank Funds Transfer (IBFT) and ATM withdrawal in the country and it has issued a clarification on the matter and reason behind the service degradation that caused a major disruption to banking services.
“This is to inform that 1LINK’s affected core switch services, which process OFFUS ATM cash withdrawals, OFFUS POS transactions and Inter Bank Funds Transfers (1IBFT), have been fully restored since last night and the system is functioning optimally.” 1Link said in a press release.
Furthermore, it explained the reason behind the outage, saying that it was caused “because of the technical malfunction between the communication of our database server with the application that serves as the core switch platform.”
1Link has carried out a deep-seated root cause analysis with their technology solution providers to ensure future continuity without disruption. Furthermore, 1Link was also able to identify certain processing issues with some of their member’s system during this period, which they will be addressing separately with them to ensure better services in the future.
It must be noted that despite service degradation from 1Link’s end, the entire system wasn’t down and several transactions were going through. According to 1Link, it processed 0.96 million ATM cash withdrawals, 1.98 million IBFTs and 0.08 Million POS transactions on December 2, 2022, which were as per regular trend of transaction over a period of 15 days.
1Link says that it is monitoring systems vigilantly, working on any outstanding settlement issues an clearing the backlog in non-financial transactions monitoring.
