Commonwealth Bank says it has resolved a string of technical problems that plagued its internet and mobile banking platforms on Wednesday.
Customers began reporting issues using the services from around 8am and the bank acknowledged the system-wide problems in a notification posted on its website at 10.30am.
Many accountholders reported being unable to log in to the digital services throughout the morning.
When they were eventually able to access the platforms those with retail loans were unable to view any details about their mortgages and personal loans for at least seven hours.
The bank also revealed it was unable to process scheduled payments throughout the morning and the early afternoon.
CBA warned customers on its website to avoid trying to process payments for a second time because such efforts would likely result in separate transactions being generated.
Unfortunately, the bank repeated its practice of not acknowledging on social media platforms the system-wide interruptions to services.
As a result the advice not to reprocess payments was never broadcast to Twitter and Facebook users.
While customers used Twitter to raise concerns about service degradation throughout Wednesday, the bank elected not to confirm on Twitter and Facebook details about the protracted misfiring of its systems.
This public relations tactic appeared to achieve its desired outcome for the bank with no electronic or print news outlet publishing any reports about the multi-faceted outage.
At 3.30 in the afternoon the bank announced on its “service updates” webpage that IT teams had restored digital services to normal operation.
“All accounts are now visible in both NetBank and the CommBank app, and all scheduled payments have now been processed,” the bank said.
“We sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused.”
Delays to the processing of scheduled payments could potentially result in CBA customers settling biller accounts at least a day late.
That could result in customers incurring late fees from billers.
In a statement issued by the CBA’s media unit last night, the bank apologised for the inconvenience caused to customers but volunteered no details about compensating those accountholders likely to incur late fees from third parties.
Following other recent outages affecting payments services CBA has doled out so-called “sorry payment” of A$50 to customers.
The last such payment was made to around 100,000 accountholders after an outage in October last year.
Bendigo Bank and Up also endured a long outage beginning on Tuesday night. Bendigo and Up distinguished themselves for their communication with customers.