This article was sourced from Sydney Morning Herald. Article by Ben Grubb.
CommBank suffered an almost three-hour long major outage on Friday afternoon that affected its Eftpos machines and customers’ access to some features in Netbank, its online banking system.
The outage, which began about 12pm AEST, was affecting customers across Australia, leaving some people unable to pay for items.
“What’s the story??” business owner Craig Percival, of Brisbane, wrote on the company’s Facebook page on Friday.
“None of my eftpos machines are working. Makes it very hard to run a business!”
Other business owners were also complaining of a lack of status updates from the bank and long lines at Eftpos terminals.
“Dear Commonwealth Bank, if you are experiencing a widespread system problem preventing your customers from taking money from their customers can you PLEASE notify your customers via social media,” one business owner said.
“Your call centres get overloaded and we all have to wait – including our customers.”
CommBank said services were restored by 2.40pm, however the bank acknowledged some customers may face slight delays in its branches even though the issue has been identified and fixed.
“We apologise to all our customers affected by this issue and we thank them for their patience,” a bank spokesman said.
Customer Evan Harrison wrote on the company’s Facebook page that she was considering switching banks because of the outage.
“Not happy commbank…..your system has crashed once again when I am traveling!” she said.
“What’s the go with all cba eftpos services not working????” wrote another customer, Candice Bowles, in Melbourne.
CommBank acknowledged the issues on Twitter when users asked about them, saying it was aware of them and investigating.
“We will provide further updates soon,” it said to users who asked.
The outage follows similar technical issues at NAB, with businesses blaming thousands of dollars in lost sales on instability plaguing its secure credit card payment system.
For specialist advice regarding your specific circumstances, please contact the BCR team.
