CUA restores services after second day of disruption

Credit Union Australia revived most of its core operations yesterday and overnight, ending two days of severely curtailed services.

Four hundred thousand Credit Union customers across Australia had been without access to most of their banking services for two days because CUA's headquarters and central data centre, in Eagle Street, Brisbane, had to be evacuated on Wednesday. Grid power and back-up generators were also shut down.

The number of CUA branches closed because of flooding fell to four yesterday - from 11 on Wednesday. Ipswich, Indooroopilly and Brisbane's Eagle Street and Broadway on the Mall were closed again yesterday and are likely to be closed again today.

Chief executive Chris Whitehead said the crisis management centre at Eight Mile Plains was managing the situation well and was not under threat from either power failure or the floods.

"Both data centres have power now," said Whitehead, at 3.40pm, yesterday.

"We are currently working on getting the core processing system up and running again, but I don't want to put an ETA on that because... [we] don't want to set up expectations."

CUA subsequently advised late yesterday that customer access to its RediATM network and to other networks had returned to normal, with the cardholder daily ATM transaction limit restored to the usual $1000.

Internet banking services returned late in the afternoon though customer's could not access statements. The remainder of the website remained offline prior to publication this morning.

Whitehead said the other major task now facing CUA was batch-processing all customer transactions nationwide, though this work was likely to have been completed overnight.

Chris Whitehead again wanted to reassure all CUA customers that their data remained safe and secure, and was housed in multiple locations that were unaffected by floods.