KARACHI: Millions of customers of the largest private sector bank of Pakistan, Habib Bank Limited (HBL), are facing difficulties for the third consecutive day on Thursday after its centralised system broke down on January 4, 2022.

The system went completely out of the customers’ reach, depriving them from making transactions on both online and manual systems.

The HBL officials claimed restoration and normalisation of the system; however, a customer at a bank branch on Thursday complained about long queues due to the technical fault.

An official of the branch said the centralised system was working fine but sometime accessing issues were causing delays.

The HBL has 1,700 branches across the country with around 23 million accountholders.

Shabahat Ali, an IT expert, said once the system shuts down, it takes time or even days depending on the size of the database to recover.

The bank has a large database, it has customers’ computerised information since 2007.

Earlier, the details of the accountholders of Habib Bank Limited suddenly disappeared when technical faults forced the account management system to shut down a couple of days ago.

However, the system partially restored on the same day and some of the accountholders are now able to view their balance and other details online.

“Due to the network slowdown, some of our customers are facing difficulties,” a bank spokesman said, adding “The system is slow for the last two days and despite problems, the bank completed around five million transactions in two days.

Some believe the apparent technical faults may be due to the cyber-attack. The Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) had come across the same issues in August 2021.

It declared that it had shut down the system; following the database flagged an alert. The revenue body managed to secure the taxpayers information but its system remained slowed for several days.

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KARACHI: The largest private sector bank of Pakistan, i.e., Habib Bank Limited...