Spruikers of the cashless economy myth were thrown another curveball on Monday after a five-hour outage at Commonwealth Bank forced mobile wallet users to converge on branches and ATMs to get cash.
The bank’s credit and debit card services went into meltdown at around 9am with customers reporting a myriad of problems trying to complete transactions over the internet and at retail outlets.
A bank spokesperson last night declined to comment on the cause of the outage, which also left customers unable to locate credit and debit accounts on digital platforms.
Credit card users trying to complete transactions with internet retailers also found their payment requests were getting declined.
Social media platforms reported chaos at petrol stations and supermarkets across the country as thousands of mobile wallet users were stranded by the outage.
“Some customers were unable to make payments via their digital wallets,” a CBA spokesperson said.
“We instructed those customers who were experiencing issues to insert their card and use their PIN.
“For those that didn’t have their card and exclusively use their device to tap and pay, cardless cash was available via CommBank ATMs.”
However, some customers also reported on Twitter that CBA ATMs were rejecting requests for cardless cash in the evening.
As the outage dragged on through the morning, ATM network operators reported a spike in withdrawal activity.
“It has been a busy day for our network,” said Next Payments CEO, Tim Wildash.
The CBA spokesperson said card services began returning to normal after 1.30pm, however the bank could take weeks and months to remediate customers who reported cases of duplicated processing of transactions on their accounts.
The impact on Perth customers was pronounced given the statutory lockdown in effect across the city.
House-bound Perth customers told the bank in Facebook posts that their online grocery orders could not be completed because retailers were not receiving payments.
Customer confusion was also compounded by CBA’s conflicting communications on different platforms.
While the bank’s Twitter platform reported services were returning to normal at 2.25pm, the CBA website was still running a pop-up notification after 4pm alerting customers to problems with processing payments.