Intermittent service outages at ANZ on Tuesday could delay the processing of payroll and other high value payments until Thursday morning.
Business and retail customers began reporting problems using the bank’s internet platform from around 10.38 am, with most of the initial issues seemingly restricted in part to those reliant on using the ANZ Shield service. This app generates a one time passcode to authenticate certain ANZ Internet Banking payments and activities, typically in excess of daily payments limits.
However, early in the afternoon businesses started to notify ANZ staff that they were unable to complete payroll-related direct debits and high value transfers using the internet portal.
Customers also told the bank on social media that they could not initiate bill payments through BPay.
There was a sharp fall in the number of customers posting reports to the downdetector.com.au website at around 1.15pm and for the next hour the outage seemed to have been resolved.
But the problems returned soon after 2pm and persisted for at least another two hours.
ANZ confirmed the systemic nature of the payments processing issue in a Twitter post soon after 4pm.
The bank directed customers to use the mobile banking platform but did not appear to respond to enquiries from business customers as to whether batch payments could be done via the mobile app.
An ANZ spokesperson did not comment on whether payments apparently completed by customers earlier in the day would be processed by this morning.
ANZ has had a comparatively low number of protracted outages this year compared to other major banks.
Commonwealth Bank, despite winning numerous industry awards for its digital banking platforms, has reported the most protracted outages of the major banks since January.