# What the Swedbank outage reveals about the limits of traditional change management

DevFeed: [What the Swedbank outage reveals about the limits of traditional change management](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/the-swedbank-outage-shows-that-change-controls-don-t-work-33611.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://highscalability.com/the-swedbank-outage-shows-that-change-controls-dont-work/>)

Author: Bruce Johnston

Published: 2023-08-16T16:05:12Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [High Scalability](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/high-scalability-3.md>)

Topics: [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/incident.md>), [risk-management](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/risk-management.md>)

Tags: [banking](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/banking.md>), [incident](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/incident.md>), [management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/management.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [risk-management](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/risk-management.md>)

## AI overview

The article examines the Swedish FSA's judgment on Swedbank's April 2022 outage, which followed an unapproved IT change and affected customer balances and payments. It argues that traditional change-management controls, including manual approvals and change meetings, do not by themselves guarantee safe and secure changes.

## Source excerpt

This week I've been reading through the recent judgment from the Swedish FSA on the Swedbank outage. If you're unfamiliar with this story, Swedbank had a major outage in April 2022 that was caused by an unapproved change to their IT systems. It temporarily left nearly