When news of an IT glitch at one of biggest banks in Ethiopia spread across the country’s universities last weekend, people couldn’t believe their luck.
In the early hours of the morning, tens of thousands of students flocked to campus ATMs and logged into their apps to make the most of a software failure that allowed them to withdraw more money than they had in their accounts.
By the time the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia learned of the glitch and paused transfers and withdrawals from its roughly 40 million customers, bringing digital economic activity to a grinding halt, an estimated 2.4 billion Birr ($63 million) had already disappeared.
Police arrived at ATMs to bust up the withdrawals and stayed on campuses to investigate.
Commercial Bank of Ethiopia CEO Abe Sano said the bank was in contact with police to get the money back but it would not pursue legal action against anyone who gives up the money willingly, according to Associated Press.
Universities likewise called on their students to hand back the cash, warning of possible repercussions if they failed to do so.
Local media reported that EthSwitch, an organisation created by the country’s banks to help interoperability between them, shared details to other Ethiopian banks about accounts involved in exploiting the glitch so they could be blocked.
Ethiopia’s central bank put out a statement on Sunday saying the outages caused by the incident were a result of “regular system updates and inspections” and was not the result of a cyber security incident.
“The National Bank of Ethiopia would like to strongly remind financial institutions that they have to work continuously in view of the changing nature of technology in order to increase the security and efficiency of their systems,” it said.
When the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia paused transactions across its system, it caused havoc with reports of people unable to pay for petrol – a problem reminiscent of last year’s catastrophic Optus outage that left businesses and customers unable to make transactions.
