The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) has confirmed that no customer funds were lost due to a brief system outage that occurred in the early hours of March 16th.
From 1am on March 16th, CBE experienced interruptions to its branch and digital banking services for over 12 hours.
In today's press conference, CBE President Abe Sano stated that the bank was not subjected to any cyber attack during this period.
“CBE faces regular cyber attack attempts but relies on its strong cyber security systems,” he added.
Abe explained that the outage from 1am on March 16th was not due to system failure, but rather a loophole created during system upgrades. He added that efforts have been exerted to identify and block illegal money transfers following the incident.
“CBE constantly updates its digital services and makes improvements for customer convenience. The bank's cyber security has also been certified to various international standards, assuring customers of protection,” added Abe.
A preliminary investigation confirmed that while 490,000 transactions were impacted during the outage hours, all customer accounts and data remained secure, according to Abe.