Biggest Bank in Venezuela Suffers 5 Day Outage After Hack Attempt

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The Bank of Venezuela, one of the biggest state banks in the country, is now experiencing an outage that has left its customers without services for five days. The bank published a PR statement stating this was the result of a “terrorist attack” on the national financial system, being perpetrated in the form of a massive hack. More than 16 million customers are still without banking services at the time of writing.

Bank of Venezuela Hacked In “Terrorist Attack”

The Bank of Venezuela, one of the biggest financial institutions in the country, servicing more than 16 million customers, is facing an outage that has left its online platform without service for five days. Bank customers starting complaining about the outage for these services on September 15, when some of them took their concerns to social media.

At that time, a worker of the bank told local media that the outage was the product of several adaptations that were being made to the online platform of the bank to support the Digital Bolivar redenomination plan. The bank issued a PR statement via social networks stating it was working to restitute the service on September 16.

However, this did not happen. On September 17, the bank issued yet another statement revealing the institution had been hacked as an attempt to perpetuate a “terrorist attack” on the national financial system. The statement also told users their financial information was safe, and that the bank was still working to restitute the services. No more details were offered.

16 Million Users Affected; Restitution Announced

The aftermath of this left more than 16 million users without banking services for a week. This means that a lot of people couldn’t make goods and services purchases and they are still waiting to make their everyday expenses.

Some of these users complained about this and stated this outage made them unable to buy food and medicines for their families. However, the Bank of Venezuela outed a statement stating their services will be restituted. The statement claims that services will be available again on September 20 and that the institution managed to preserve the integrity of the data, meaning that users will be able to access their accounts with the same information.

This is one of the longest outages that any bank had faced in the story of the country and reinforces the importance of the existence of an alternate finance system like cryptocurrencies, that would help deal with this kind of event.

What do you think about the Bank of Venezuela’s 5-day service outage? Tell us in the comments section below.