St George Bank, Bank SA and Bank of Melbourne all down after outage
Customers have been left unable to access their money after a widespread outage took down internet and mobile banking.
Banking
Don't miss out on the headlines from Banking. Followed categories will be added to My News.
St George bank has restored mobile and internet banking services after customers were left frustrated by an outage that prevented them accessing their money two days after a similar issue.
BankSA and Bank of Melbourne, which are part of Sydney based St George, were also affected.
At 1.50pm, St George announced it has restored the services and customers should notice them return to normal.
Update 1.50pm: Good news, our Internet and Mobile Banking services are now back up and returning to normal. Please accept our wholehearted apologies for the frustration and inconvenience we've caused you today.
— St.George Bank (@StGeorgeBank) October 29, 2019
The three banks have sent out almost identical messages on social media throughout the outage.
The bank first announced shortly before 9am that services were down.
There are currently difficulties with our Internet and Mobile Banking. We're working to fix them ASAP and will update you here. Our apologies, we know how frustrating this must be.
— St.George Bank (@StGeorgeBank) October 28, 2019
An hour and a half later things still weren’t fixed.
“We are still working to restore our internet and mobile banking service as soon as we can,” the update at 10.30am said.
Westpac, which owns all three banks, doesn’t appear to be experiencing similar issues.
At 1pm the services remained down as the bank worked to fix the issue, but it said St George ATMs, EFTPOS and credit cards weren’t affected.
Update: Our teams are working hard to have Internet and Mobile Banking available again as soon as possible. Our ATMs, EFTPOS and credit cards are still operating as normal. We're very sorry for this inconvenience.
— St.George Bank (@StGeorgeBank) October 29, 2019
Update: our apologies, we are still working to restore our Internet and Mobile Banking as soon as we can. We'll keep you updated here.
— Bank of Melbourne (@BankofMelb) October 28, 2019
Update: our apologies, we are still working to restore our Internet and Mobile Banking service as soon as we can. We'll keep you updated here.
— BackSA (@BankSA) October 28, 2019
St George customers were particularly annoyed that the outage came so quickly after a similar issue over the weekend took down some services for more than five hours.
Very frustrating. Especially frustrating when it's happened twice in the space of less than 48 hours.
— Sue (@sueblue35) October 29, 2019
What’s going on?!? This is the 2nd time in the last few days you have had an extensive outage. Not being able to access internet banking is a massive inconvenience when bills need to be paid today!!!
— Attila Rozgonyi (@attilarozgonyi) October 29, 2019
“Absolute joke. This shouldn’t happen,” said one Bank SA customer. Another said she would change banks due to the ongoing IT woes.
A St George customer said the tech problems were “ridiculous”.
“Thanks for the reminder to close my accounts and shift all my banking.”
It’s not clear yet whether today’s outage has been caused by the same issue.
The outage comes less than a fortnight after the Commonwealth Bank was hit with a long-running outage that left many cut off from their cash.
The outage delayed payments for some customers and the bank deposited $50 into some accounts as an apology.
Following the outage Commonwealth Bank confirmed it was the result of “infrastructure upgrade” that crippled the bank’s real time transactions platform.
St George is yet to provide a reason for its ongoing outage.
In 2015, the company suffered an outage that lasted more than 24 hours after a mainframe computer system was corrupted during an update.
Have you been impacted by the outage? Let us know in the comments below.
Originally published as St George Bank, Bank SA and Bank of Melbourne all down after outage