Please explain, Westpac

After a massive failure of service and communication, Westpac has a great deal of explaining to do and reassurances to first provide and then live up to. In a time of viral uncertainties, when widespread nervousness about long-term financial security mixes with the unease of in-your-face health concerns about tasks as routine as basic shopping transactions, the last thing anyone needed was to be severed from their own existing finances.

But on the afternoon of May 11 down it all went. The bank’s eftpos services, website, app and call centre all collapsed into a state of concussion. People standing at the supermarket checkout, or having just tanked up the car, were presented with sniffy ‘‘declined’’ messages carrying the mortifying potential implication they simply lacked the money.

Others, around their home offices and kitchen tables, were fizzing in frustration as they tried to load sometimes urgent payments.

After several hours, a patchup was in place. Next day, Westpac was able to announce more comprehensive restoration.

Unhappily, after rightly acknowledging that it had added to what were already stressful times, Westpac was then puffing into its customers’ faces the halitosis of stale corporate apology ‘‘for the inconvenience’’.

Inconvenience? Merely that for some, but far worse for many others. They were denied necessities rather than wants. They were planning to bring food home for their families. Even if they were among the minority of people who still carry significant amounts of cash on them, plenty of shops aren’t accepting filthy lucre in these covidwary times.

And Westpac looks after Work and Income payments to other banks’ customers as well. People on benefits and superannuation are often poorly placed to be serene about being unexpectedly caught short.

All of which would have been maddening enough if people knew what on earth was going on as the hours passed. But there was no capacity for direct text messages to, say, warn them not to make fruitless, sometimes quite long, trips to shops and retail outlets.

Social media was the bank’s only direct channel of communication still standing. Even then, to the scorn of Snapchat and TikTok devotees, it was only old-school Facebook.

While there were many burning questions they couldn’t answer, at least the personnel in that forum weren’t purring about inconvenience. ‘‘It’s gutting to hear of people unable to get their groceries . . .’’

Adding to the climate of confusion was whether this had been some sort of extension of earlier, planned but not especially well-publicised maintenance work that had been scheduled to make online transactions unavailable in the wee small hours of May 11. It wasn’t, we are assured. The disruptions later that day were an entirely unanticipated outage of a complicated nature.

As it sifts through the more than 4000 comments posted, Westpac will find some pretty good steers about what so many people now want to know.

What steps is a bank that posted a $1 billion cash profit for the 2019 year undertaking to improve its service reliability and backup communication capacity in general? Why not a system of text notifications? Why not an alternative option to that ‘‘declined’’ eftpos message that at least acknowledges a potential processing problem, or properly identifies it as such?

And, if it’s not too much to ask, people want to know what on earth actually happened.

All of which would have been maddening enough if people knew what on earth was going on.