Sberbank of Russia in its current form was established in 1991 and became the largest financial institution in the country - it employs more than a quarter of a million employees. Since 1993, this bank has been issuing credit and debit cards and is the largest card issuer in Russia. Therefore, any interruption in the work on servicing Sberbank credit cards could potentially affect millions of Russians.
On the night of Monday to Tuesday, August 27, 2012, Sberbank suspended the servicing of its own issued credit cards in its ATMs for 50 minutes. This happened at one o'clock in the morning Moscow time, and the reason was the pre-planned work on the modernization of the processing center software. At the same time, credit and debit cards of other banks were served without any restrictions. The largest financial institution in Russia notified its clients about the planned service interruption three days before the appointed date. In total, the bank has already issued more than 70 million of such cards, and the daily number of transactions on them averages 15 million.
Relatively recently, at the beginning of July, there was already a break in servicing cards issued by Sberbank in its ATMs. However, then this was not a planned event, but was the result of a failure in the work of the bank's processing service. According to Viktor Orlovsky, CIO of the bank, the troubles occurred due to the fact that the database management system stopped clearing the logs of transactions stored on the server. As a result, the disks became full and the system was unable to process new requests. And then I also had to clean up the logs in manual mode, since the automatic mode also failed. As a result, clients could not use Sberbank cards and the Internet banking system for three hours during the “peak” time - from 5 pm to 8 pm Moscow time. To find out the reasons for all these troubles with the database, its developer, Oracle, was involved. It is quite probable that it was the July failure, the largest in the history of the bank's work with cards, and the results of the work done to prevent its recurrence that caused the system upgrade to be carried out on August 27.
