Africa's largest bank suffered a five hour outage this week after an issue with its IT systems.

Standard Bank Group said that the problem impacted customers in nine countries. The cause of the outage was not disclosed.

Users could not access the mobile banking app, while those in South Africa could not use Internet banking.

“Efforts to restore these services to their full functionality took longer than expected,” the company said.

Africa's biggest lender by assets, Standard Bank operates in 20 countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

Back in 2019, the company announced it would shift the majority of its production workloads, customer-facing platforms and "strategic core banking applications" to Amazon Web Services, but the outage is not thought to be related to this week's major AWS failure in Northern Virginia.

Following its move to the cloud, Standard Bank has begun selling off its data centers to companies like Africa Data Centres. It still maintains a presence in some of the facilities.