Many Australians were on Thursday morning confronted with strange behaviour on their bank accounts, with an industry-wide outage rendering many banks unable to transfer funds.
The outage was brought to our attention in a tweet from ANZ bank, but reports on the outage first emerged around 7 pm on Wednesday.
Hi everyone, we’re currently experiencing an industry-wide outage to New Payments Platform (NPP)/Osko payments made via Internet Banking, ANZ App and ANZ Plus. The processing of some payments may be delayed and some payments may fail… 1/2
— ANZ Australia (@ANZ_AU) October 12, 2022
The blue bank was also providing notifications through its app.
The Commonwealth Bank of Australia was telling customers a similar thing as ANZ, asking people to not retry payments.
Hi there. The RBA is currently affected by an issue affecting OSKO payments, they’re looking into this and we will provide an update for our customers as soon as possible. Please don’t retry your transaction. ^Delz
— CommBank (@CommBank) October 12, 2022
Meanwhile, ING had a banner on its website that read, “We are currently investigating an issue effecting payments across the network. We will update you here as soon as the issue is resolved. We thank you for your patience.”
Westpac, however, was under the impression everything was A OK.
Hi Matt, we’ve aware that an issue had been identified by the payment platform operators and was impacting all payments across Australian Financial Institutions. Please know that this has since been resolved. ^Liv
— Westpac Bank (@Westpac) October 12, 2022
By the afternoon, everything was returning to normal. ANZ told customers that payments were being processed, as did CBA, confirming, however, that delays would still be experienced.
• ANZ customers may see delays of up to 1-2 business days for inward payments from another financial institution.
• Some ANZ customers may see a failed outward payment and will need to resubmit upon seeing a refund in their account.Thank you for your patience. 2/2
— ANZ Australia (@ANZ_AU) October 13, 2022
The issue, as you can see, was affecting the New Payments Platform and Osko payments.
The New Payments Platform, which now isn’t so new, is basically an upgraded banking system for Australia. It launched back in 2018. Its biggest selling point was that it allows for the transfer of money from one person to another in near real-time, using an email address or phone number rather than the traditional BSB or account number process. It was built by the Reserve Bank of Australia in consultation with 13 banks, comprised of the “big four” and some smaller ones.
Many banks built their own superfast payment infrastructure, but other smaller banks utilise the one built by Osko.
Up until now, you haven’t really needed to know how it all worked, let alone who was behind it, you just needed to know your mate could have your $30 within seconds.
There’s no news of what happened at this stage, but we’ll let you know more when we do.
This article has been updated since it was first published.