A major Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) outage on October 17 left millions of Australians around the country unable to transfer or receive money while other bank customers also felt the impact. While CBA has said systems have now returned to normal, customers are still reporting problems.
The outage occurred around the afternoon on October 17, according to DownDetector, with people reporting they were unable to pay for items, transfer money or receive payments from employers. Some customers alleged they had to leave trolleys of shopping goods behind as their cards would not process payments.
CBA issued a tweet stating services had returned to normal by 6am on October 18 but that there was a backlog of payments to process, which would cause delay for some. Other services being affected included:
- Some debit card payments may be impacted
- CommBank app and NetBank payments
- BPAY services including PAY-ID payments
- Cardless Cash and Cardless Deposits not available
- Some in-branch services
- Some call centre services
- Processing of some CommBiz payments
(1/3 ) Update 6AM: We’ve been working to restore the network systems overnight and they are now returning to normal. Some payments may be delayed. We’re working through these as quickly as possible. All payments both in to and out of customer accounts will be properly processed.
— CommBank (@CommBank) October 17, 2019
But by 2.15pm, CBA released another statement that services were still being delayed and that CBA customers would be treated as a priority.
Update 2.15PM:
Our services continue to operate as normal.
We are working through the backlog of payments as quickly as possible and rest assured that all payments both into and out of customer accounts are being processed as a priority.
More info: https://t.co/mqJe94qXDN
— CommBank (@CommBank) October 18, 2019
Customers on DownDetector were still reporting issues of missing money as recent as 1pm on October 18. CBA has yet to provide details on what caused the issue but has referred to “internal system issues related to an upgrade implemented on Thursday.”
If you’re not a customer with CBA and you’re still being affected by the outage, CBA recommends contacting your own bank. Other banks, such as ING, however, recommend dealing with CBA directly.
We are unable to expedite funds being cleared into the account, if they are not showing in your account this means they have not come through to us yet. Should you require funds urgently you will need to refer back to CBA as the outage is from their end. ^Victoria
— ING Australia (@ING_Aust) October 18, 2019
While the situation is finally being resolved after a wild 24 hours for some Australians, it’s interesting to see how these sorts of outages will affect the future as physical cash moves further into the obsolete.
[referenced url=”https://gizmodo.com.au/2018/05/telstras-having-another-outage/” thumb=”https://gizmodo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Telstra-410×231.jpg” title=”Telstra’s Having Another Outage [Updated]” excerpt=”Telstra’s mobile network is having another outage this morning, with users noting that the 4G network is down across the country.”]