Commonwealth Bank Outage a Sign?
I’ve been reading about the history of Australia, in particular the first Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. The Labor Party started the Commonwealth Bank. I saw symbolism in this outage as when things are linked electronically people can be cut off. I note someone couldn’t eat such is the umbilical chord of money to those dependent on a system increasingly remote from its community as it globalises with perspectives looking far offshore.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/banking-and-finance/commbank-online-customers-locked-out-visa-transactions-down-20180820-p4zyjk.html
‘Day of starvation’ as CommBank online customers unable to access funds
Commonwealth Bank customers have been blocked from making online payments and accessing the CommBank phone app for hours on Monday, while non-CBA Visa card transactions at the bank’s terminals were down across the country until the afternoon.
The bank issued a statement about 7am saying it was aware of an issue affecting Visa card transactions at CBA merchant terminals and some payments via its online banking service NetBank and its mobile phone CommBank app.
Photo: AAP
A later statement, issued about midday, said: “We’re starting to see services restore for issues affecting non-CBA Visa card transactions at CBA merchant terminals and some payments in NetBank and CommBank app.
“As we restore service, customers may experience a delay logging into the CommBank app.”
A spokesman said the bank was unsure how many people had been affected.
“It’s other institutions’ Visa cards … it’s not affecting our own MasterCard, so it’s a little bit difficult to put a number on how many people are affected,” he said.
A Twitter user from Melbourne tweeted that they had been unable to transfer money since 5am.
“No food, no money to transfer meaning a day of starvation. I’m on the verge of collapsing,” the user wrote.
Another person from Brisbane tweeted that they had a “trolley full of groceries here at Coles and I can’t pay”.
As of 2pm, the Netbank website was still down and some users were still unable to access the app – despite tweets from CommBank that both were up and running.
By the afternoon, customers responding to the bank on Twitter were growing increasingly frustrated with the bank’s social media updates that were not reflecting their experience.
“Would be much more helpful to get an actual ETA of when this will be fixed, instead of these useless ‘updates’,” one tweeted.
The spokesman said the issues with online banking came down to “when people were trying to log onto the app”.
“It’s a capacity thing as we gradually work through it.”
With customers still experiencing issues after 2pm, the spokesman said CBA was aware of the problem and was working on a fix.
“We know this is frustrating and we apologise for this. Some customers may still have intermittent issues with payments and transfers in NetBank and [the] CommBank app. We’re working to resolve service as soon as possible.”
As for the Visa card transactions on CBA terminals, those are “now processing normally”, he said.
It is unclear when the issues are expected to be entirely resolved.