140 Japanese Credit Cooperatives Hit by System Glitch

Tokyo, Jan. 29 (Jiji Press)–Some services at 140 “shinyo kumiai” credit cooperatives across Japan, including remittances, became temporarily unavailable Thursday due to a system failure, their central banking body said. The services came back to normal after being restored in stages from around noon, about eight hours from the start of the glitch, said the organization, Shinkumi Federation Bank. The organization denied that the problem was caused by a cyberattack. It is investigating the cause. The system error occurred around 4 a.m. at SKC Center, which is run by a Shinkumi Federation Bank subsidiary and provides business processing services for such cooperatives, also known as shinkumi banks. It caused outages of some services at member cooperatives, including money transfers to and from other financial institutions and deposits and withdrawals at branch counters. Meanwhile, services other than money transfers offered through automatic teller machines and online banking services were unaffected. Of Shinkumi Federation Bank’s 143 member cooperatives, 140 are hooked up with SKC Center’s system hit by the glitch. END [Copyright The Jiji Press, Ltd.]