Financial institutions are concerned about the resiliency of their AI operations after core internet service provider Cloudflare suffered its second outage in a week. 

According to Downdetector, 606 outage reports were filed for Cloudflare by 10:50 a.m. ET today. 

Resiliency is becoming a major topic for internet service providers amid the recent outages, Sanjay Sidhwani, chief data and analytics officer at Morristown, N.J.-based Valley Bank, told FinAi News.  

It’s not just the internet but the tech that drives it as the industry becomes “more dependent on AI technologies,” he said, adding that an Amazon Web Services outage last month also affected many organizations. 

“If I embed AI into my [anti-money laundering], I need the models to run. Like, I can’t have an outage,” Sidhwani said. “Once the outage gets to more critical applications like our call centers, and if the representatives are only trained on AI, it affects our customer satisfaction.” 

AI as a shield 

While AI systems are at risk for outages, they can also help banks and payments companies fight them, Fadl Mantash, chief information security officer at London-based Tribe Payments, told FinAi News. 

“AI is still far from being a perfect or complete solution, but it can significantly reduce the frequency, duration and impact of incidents,” Mantash said. 

AI can help FIs in: 

• Improving monitoring and detecting issues or vulnerabilities earlier; 

• Minimizing risk at the design stage by predicting failure scenarios; 

• Supporting faster incident response by identifying root causes and suggesting fixes in real time; and 

• Detecting security threats before and during outages, and understanding how outages can expose vulnerabilities. 

“AI won’t eliminate outages, but it can make them far less damaging,” Mantash said. 

Service provider Deeplearning.ai used AI to get its website running again during the last Cloudflare outage on Nov. 18. 

“When Cloudflare went down, our engineers used AI coding to quickly implement a clone of basic Cloudflare capabilities to run our site on,” founder and Chief Executive Andrew Ng wrote in a LinkedIn post on Nov. 19. 

While tech companies can create clones of some services and get operations off the ground, it is different for banks, Valley Bank’s Sidhwani explained. 

“We can get our website and product catalogue up, but you actually need your banking applications functional, and I don’t think that’s feasible yet with AI,” Sidhwani said. 

“Let’s say our core banking goes down and customers can’t check their balances, there isn’t an alternative to that,” Sidhwani said. 

For now, banks can look for points of exposure and decide how each application can be made more resilient during outages, he said. 

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