Aussies left with no cash as millions hit by CommBank tech glitch

CommBank, owned by banking giant the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, has infuriated many of its millions of customers by leaving them without access to funds and even wiping their financial records – while allegedly failing to inform customers directly of the outages of its online services.

In a tweet on its @CommBank main Twitter account at about 8pm on Wednesday, the bank said that it understood customers were “continuing to experience issues with Netbank, CommBank app and CommBiz”. “We know that this is frustrating and we are sorry,” the bank added. “Our teams are working very hard to get things back up again.”

On its website, CommBank said in a short notice that it had conducted scheduled maintenance and upgrades to NetBank at the weekend that took longer than expected, and as a result, NetBank was unavailable to customers, while credit card details failed to display on Monday. On Thursday morning, the statement did not appear to have been updated since earlier in the week, while CommBank’s newsroom webpage and newsroom Twitter account contained no mention of the outage.

The few tweets addressing the problem appeared to do little to pacify customers, with one called @sienna_smiles tweeting that the outage had “really stuffed up” her life on Wednesday. “Kids went hungry until 9.30 tonight because we were hanging out for the money to come in after having no money for three days.”

CBA’s annual report for 2017 said that 6.2 million of its 16.6 million customers used its digital banking facilities.

Jen Dudley-Nicholson, the national technology editor for News Corp, meanwhile, tweeted on Wednesday night that it had so far been a marathon outage for an Australian business and that she couldn’t believe the bank had failed to directly inform customers or name a possible cause for the problem. In a story for the Herald Sun, Dudley -Smith reported that the outage appeared to have wiped the balances of home and personal loans for some customers and impacted bill payments made via BPAY. Other customers had their cards declined in stores, bank transfers fail and wages fail to be credited to their accounts.

The site aussieoutages.com, which tracks online breakdowns, showed that some customers continued to experience difficulties on Thursday morning.

“My wages haven’t hit my savings account direct debits not processed since 3pm yesterday,” a user called Alicia commented.

The tech problems hadn’t, however, appeared to have impacted the bank’s ability to charge feel, with one customer cited by Yahoo!7 reporting that although they were unable to use their accounts, CommBank had been able to levy a $10 overdrawn fee on their account.

A user called Gray wrote on aussieoutages.com that he had lost a day’s wages due to being unable to buy petrol and that, luckily, he had a nice boss, otherwise he could’ve been out of a job entirely. “If we’re late we get penalised with fees, yet if the bank’s late they get away with a simple sorry,” he noted.

UPDATE: CommBank issued a statement at approximately 9am Thursday that said its teams had worked “non-stop” to fix the problems with NetBank, the CommBank app and CommBiz services, which had now been 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 statement said. “Commonwealth Bank apologies to all customers who were affected by this issue and we thank them for their patience.”

The bank told Starts at 60 that it would work on a case-by-case basis to help customers disadvantaged by fees during the outage.

Do you use online banking? Are you impacted by the outage? Do you generally find online banking convenient?