Customers of 128 Japanese credit unions were left unable to withdraw cash today after one of Japan’s banking systems suffered an outage amid cascading price drops across the country’s stock market.
Local media reports that the Shinkin Joint Center outage rendered ATM machines across the Tokai region unable to process withdrawals, deposits, or over-the-counter transactions.
According to reports, the cause of the outage wasn’t the result of a cyberattack, but rather an “equipment malfunction.”
Initial reports suggested that it would be difficult to restore services today but various banks managed to do this by 7pm Japanese Standard Time.
Outage happened as Japan’s stock market slumped 7%
The outage took place as Japan’s Nikkei 225 stock index fell by 7% amid a wider AI stock selloff that cost Wall Street $3.2 trillion.
South Korea’s KOSPI stock index also finished the day down 6%.
Read more: AI insiders had already cashed out $7.4 billion before stocks crashed
The tech slump was reportedly caused by investors’ fears that a Democrat-led US government might slow down the progress of AI centers, and that Claude owner Anthropic may no longer go public this month.
Lucky AI insiders, however, were able to personally cash out $7.4 billion near peak prices throughout May to October, beating the slump.
UK banks also suffered an outage last month
Just a couple of weeks ago, banks across the UK were also disrupted by an outage in a London-based Google Cloud data center.
Not only were ATM withdrawals and deposits not working, but identity verification, card payments, transfers, signing in, chat support, stocks and crypto trading were all disrupted.
This incident was also not the result of a cyberattack, but rather a “power event.”
Got a tip? Send us an email securely via Protos Leaks. For more informed news and investigations, follow us on X, Bluesky, and Google News, or subscribe to our YouTube channel.