Banking disruption hits services at eight Iranian banks
File photo of people queue at an ATM in an Iranian city as customers seek access to banking services.
At least eight Iranian banks suffered widespread service disruptions on Tuesday, leaving customers unable to access many electronic and card-based services days after a separate outage affected four major banks.
Customers told Iran International that services at Pasargad, Melli, Mellat, Sepah, Tejarat, Saderat, Tose’e Ta’avon and Resalat banks were severely disrupted on Tuesday with reports indicating that almost all services had become unavailable.
Some domestic media outlets also confirmed the disruptions. ILNA news agency reported that parts of Iran's banking systems had experienced outages and slowdowns since Tuesday morning.
The Informatics Services Corporation later pointed to cyberattacks as the cause of the latest problems.
“The Informatics Services Corporation has temporarily taken card-based services offline to prevent any unauthorized access and safeguard customers’ data and assets,” the company said in a statement.
Customers wait at a bank branch in Iran as staff process transactions at service counters.
Outages follow earlier attack
The disruption comes after electronic services at Melli, Tejarat, Saderat and Tose’e Saderat banks were hit by major outages on June 13.
Those problems affected mobile banking, internet banking, automated teller machines, point-of-sale terminals and other card services.
A day later, the Coordination Council of Banks said the outage resulted from a “limited cyberattack” targeting communications infrastructure shared by the four lenders. The council said no unauthorized access to customer data had occurred and no information had been deleted.
Meysam Zohourian, a member of parliament’s Economic Committee, later warned that a full restoration of services could take up to two weeks.
“Despite investigations by various bodies, the origin and cause of the main attack have not yet been identified, and even replacing hardware has not solved the problem,” Zohourian wrote on X.
A customer speaks with a bank teller at a branch in Iran.
Infrastructure under scrutiny
Zohourian also criticized the role of the Informatics Services Corporation, which provides key banking and payment infrastructure and is partly owned by the Central Bank and several commercial lenders.
Iran’s banking sector has faced repeated service outages in recent years, many of them linked to cyberattacks. Such disruptions have become more common during periods of conflict and heightened security concerns, raising questions about the resilience of the country’s financial infrastructure.