Flak flies over big outage at bank

THE Commonwealth Bank’s unprecedented technical outage that stranded customers at cash registers around the country has finally ended more than 25 hours after it began.

The country’s richest bank announced an end to the marathon outage on social networks yesterday, but failed to reach out to its 6.2 million active online customers directly.

“We’re sorry that our customers experienced issues with our systems yesterday,’’ the company said in a statement.

“Our teams have worked non-stop to fix the problem and NetBank, CommBank app and CommBiz services are restored.

“We can also confirm credit card payments and transfers have been processed and customers will start to see these reflected in their accounts.”

The bank said customers who had been charged additional fees as a result of the outage would have compensation assessed “on a case-bycase basis”.

The technical problems, which began after 8am on Wednesday, appeared to wipe the balances of CommBank customers’ credit cards, personal loans, and mortgages, and also disabled bank transfers and BPAY bill payments.

Some Commonwealth Bank customers reported receiving Centrelink payments a day later than expected and others were unable to use their credit and debit cards, leading to embarrassment in stores.

Customers criticised the bank’s lack of communication over the outage, which they said inflamed the situation.

“I just had my credit card and key card declined at the supermarket and was left standing there with $300 worth of groceries that I couldn’t pay for,” Shayne Bonnie posted on Twitter.

“Pity you didn't inform anyone you are having system issues.”

Another customer asked, “where was the communication about this issue — I don’t check my Twitter at school but why wasn’t there a text or email?”

The bank also failed to name the cause of the 25-hour outage, only pointing to “intermittent issues”.