Over 8 Million Customers Affected as Major Outage Hits Australia’s Biggest Bank

The Commonwealth Bank, one of the “big four” Australian banks, has suffered a major outage that has left its more than eight million customers affected. Meanwhile, it is urging customers to be vigilant for scams.

(2/2) Remember, to be vigilant for hoaxes and scams and please be aware of unsolicited calls. We'll never ask you for your banking information by email or text message. For tips and ways to protect yourself from scams please visit our Scam Awareness page. https://t.co/DZhPOaZCja

— CommBank (@CommBank) October 17, 2019

The outage hit the bank at about midday on Thursday and till now the bank could not say when it could end while it is

“working overnight to restore services as soon as we can.”

Customers are left stranded as they are unable to transfer money, with some branches forced to close early.

Just after 12 pm, the bank reported of experiencing issues affecting some of its services including PayID, BPay services in CommBank app and NetBank, Cardless cash, some in-branch services, CommBiz log-on, some CommBiz payments, and some call center services while some customers are also having issues with their debit card payments.

As such, the bank temporarily closed some of its branches.

“Our ATMs and Point-Of-Sale merchant terminals are available and working,”

reported the bank.

A few hours later, the bank said they continue to work urgently to fix the problem and will have services restored soon while

“all customer accounts are safe.”

The CBA spokeswoman, however, said there was no indication that the outage was due to a cyber attack.

The bank has been regularly providing updates but still 12 hours later, services aren’t restored.

Angry customers have taken to Twitter as they get locked out of the branches and are stranded cashless in shops.

9.82 Billion in profits in 2018. Over 50% of Australia's population under the one bank. Now over 50% of Australia's currency in lock down. Absolutely ballistic and incompetent beyond measure.

— Jules Lefevre (@juleslefevre93) October 17, 2019

Hi Ben, if you do receive a fee please let us know and once the system is back up we'll fix it up for you. We're really sorry. ^Anna

— CommBank (@CommBank) October 17, 2019

And this is why we need decentralized systems.

In the last 10 years of Bitcoin, its network has never been down. Even in 2013, when bitcoin network experienced a technical crisis when version 0.7 and 0.8 diverged from each other due to a bug causing the blockchain to fork, the network wasn’t down.

Outages like these are just another instance that pushes for the need for a decentralized system like that of Bitcoin.