Commonwealth Bank blames botched upgrade for huge outage

CBA is slowly recovering from a huge outage the bank says was caused by a botched systems upgrade.

Commonwealth Bank suffered a huge systems outage on Thursday. Picture: AAP

Commonwealth Bank says customers may still experience some payment delays after a huge service outage that forced some branches to close on Thursday.

The bank blamed a systems upgrade for the issues.

“We have been working to restore the network systems overnight and these are now returning to normal,” the bank said in a statement issued on Friday morning.

“Some payments may be delayed appearing in accounts. We are working through the backlog as quickly as possible, but rest assured all payments both into and out of customer accounts will be properly processed.”

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CBA said ATM and eftpos services had been restored and that branches would open as normal on Friday. Additional call centre staff had been brought in to help deal with any outstanding issues, the bank said.

@CommBank Maybe you could reimburse every customer with a $10 downtime charge for all of our lunches today like how you charge us $10 everytime we overdraw

— RJKSports (@RJKSports) October 17, 2019

The problem first emerged on Thursday morning and the bank acknowled it was experiencing problems at around midday. The issues caused widespread problems for the bank’s customers and for businesses on Thursday, with many turning to social media to vent frustration.

In a video apology to customers published on Thursday night, CBA group executive for retail banking Angus Sullivan said the problems had affected the bank’s network infrastructure.

“I know an outage like this causes real inconvenience to our customers and I sincerely apologise for the impact,” Mr Sullivan said.