Users of CBA’s digital banking platforms have been plagued by degraded service levels this week as the bank struggles to resolve technical problems affecting credit card accounts.
The bank confirmed on Tuesday that credit card holders have been unable to access account information and balances using the mobile and internet banking platforms.
Customers have reported problems accessing credit card accounts since Monday morning when they posted complaints to the bank’s Twitter page.
The degraded service appeared to affect more customers on Tuesday when outage monitoring service Downdetector.com.au was inundated with user reports from 10am.
The problems persisted throughout Tuesday afternoon and had not been resolved as Banking Day entered production in the evening.
At 5pm, Downdetector was recording 20 user reports a minute from CBA customers.
Many customers also disputed the bank’s claim they were still able to make purchases using CBA-issued credit cards.
Despite the persistence of the issues and a steady flow of complaints to the bank’s Twitter page, CBA decided not to acknowledge the service failure with official updates on social media.
Instead, customer service officers working on social media invited affected customers to submit private messages to the bank “to help them further”.
The bank’s response to the incident triggered concern among customers that the company was focused mostly on managing the public messaging of the outage.
One Twitter user on Tuesday afternoon directly called on the bank to broadcast that there was a problem with the mobile app rather than hide the issue from public view through requests for private messages.
“Shouldn’t there be an alert in the app or at least a tweet telling customers it’s a known issue?” the customer asked.
The bank did not take the customer’s advice and elected to retain a post celebrating Father’s Day at the top of its Twitter landing page for most of the day.
There were no references on CBA’s Twitter and Facebook pages to the systemic and protracted problem of accessing credit card accounts on the digital channels.
Major banks such as CBA appear to be resorting to artful public relations tactics to minimise public fallout from service faults and outages.
Last week National Australia Bank also chose not to broadcast on social media details of a technology meltdown that delayed payments being processed for business customers for more than 24 hours.
That service failure resulted in delays in fortnightly and monthly wages being paid into the accounts of thousands of workers across the country.
The NAB incident, which occurred over 48 hours beginning on 3 September, also resulted in customer debit accounts showing incorrect balances on digital banking channels for up to 24 hours.