The Commonwealth Bank who are very quick to hit customers with late fees are not saying whether they will compensate customers after a major computer crash days out from Christmas left tens of thousands of people unable to access their account and hundreds claiming that money had been stripped from their account.Those that could according to Twitter and Facebook messages often found that their balances were not correct.
At 8.00PM both ATM and EFTPOS capabilities were down with several Commonwealth Bank customers complaining that they were unable to buy Xmas presents because of the failure. Commonwealth Bank has not commented.
During the past hour CBA customers have been very vocal and abusive of the Bank, one customer wrote: “Can’t access my account and money is missing from my account.”
Fairfax Media said the bank experienced a glitch, which reportedly resulted in customer cards being eaten by ATM machines, related to “network connectivity problems” but has yet to explain further. An eerily similar glitch occurred on exactly the same day last year.
A senior systems engineer said “The banks are not building their banking systems to cope with the busiest time of the year which is Xmas. When they overload they crash”.
Even worse Commonwealth customer service centres were not answering calls. One Facebook customer wrote
“Went to ATM and got told they had prohibited access to my card then there’s no1 answering the phones.”
CBA published an update telling customers it was aware customers “may be experiencing issues with NetBank, ATMs, and EFTPOS”.
A message issued later by the bank said “We are working to restore services as a matter of priority, and apologise for any inconvenience,” the bank said.
