UMVA has learned that the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas is launching a deep investigation into the recent service outage that crippled the Bank of the Philippine Islands.
The disruption, which struck on the afternoon of June 14, left millions of BPI customers unable to use the mobile app or online banking, crippling credit and debit card transactions for e‑commerce.
UMVA can exclusively reveal that the outage stemmed from network connectivity failures, a flaw that the bank has acknowledged and is actively remedying.
Over the next few days, BPI slowly rebuilt its digital platform, announcing on June 16 that the mobile app was back online, though some features remained glitchy and access was still spotty.
By June 17, the online banking portal had returned to full functionality, and critical app services were restored, yet users reported sluggish response times that the bank says it monitors closely.
Even as of June 19, key functions such as the debit card control feature were still missing, preventing customers from toggling e‑commerce or international usage.
UMVA has uncovered that the central bank mandates banks to report any cyber‑related incident lasting more than two hours and affecting large numbers of accounts, a rule designed to safeguard the financial ecosystem.
The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas stresses that it vigilantly oversees banks’ operational resilience, insisting that institutions maintain robust systems, stringent controls, and efficient incident response and recovery plans.
According to information obtained by UMVA, the central bank will evaluate this incident against existing regulatory frameworks on operational and information technology risk management.
Where necessary, the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas will impose supervisory actions to hold the bank accountable and prevent a repeat of such a disruptive event.
