Optus CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin
The collapse of Optus’ telecommunications network on Wednesday morning triggered waves of disruption to digital banking and customer services across the nation.
While the digital service platforms of most of the country’s 91 deposit taking institutions remained available during the outage, millions of customers were unable to access their accounts because of their dependency on Optus phone and broadband services.
The biggest direct impact on Australian banks was felt in contact centre operations, which were paralysed for most of the day at Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ.
NAB’s operations appear to have been unscathed mainly because it uses Vodafone as its main telco provider.
Commonwealth Bank, which relies heavily on Optus for the provision of telecommunications services, was the most affected by the telco’s 12-hour outage, with customers unable to make calls to the company’s contact centre.
CBA notified customers in the morning that its contact centres were unable to take calls and that its Netcode SMS-based security service was also affected.
Disruptions at the call centres persisted into the afternoon with the bank confirming at 3pm that they had not returned to normal service.
“For customers calling our contact centres please be aware there may be delays,” the bank warned.
CBA also had to advise retailers and other merchants to adjust the settings of Eftpos terminals to ensure they could continue accept payments.
It is not clear whether all merchants were readily able to reset machines given they had limited access to the bank’s support centre.
CBA claimed throughout most of the day that its branches were unaffected by the outage, but customers who contacted Banking Day reported the bank was encountering problems providing services.
One customer told Banking Day that he had been asked by the bank to attend a branch to verify his personal details but staff told him they were unable to complete the process due to the outage.
Westpac revealed that merchant customers had experienced problems processing EFTPOS transactions but reported services were returning to normal at 2.30pm.
“Some of our merchants experienced an issue processing transactions via their EFTPOS terminals as a result of the Optus outage,” the bank told merchants on its website.
“Transaction processing is returning to normal levels.”
Westpac’s call centres were also unable to accept calls until the early afternoon, but started returning to normal service after 2pm.
Other banks reporting Optus-induced issues included Macquarie Bank, Great Southern Bank and Auswide Bank.
“As we advised customers on our website earlier today, due to an outage with Optus, calls to our call centre were temporarily impacted this morning,” a Macquarie spokesperson said.
“Our phone lines are now working as normal.
“Customers were able to access their online banking as normal during this time provided they had access to a working network."
Great Southern reported it could not receive customer calls until around 2.30pm and that customers with Optus accounts were unable to make online payments.
Auswide said on social media that the mobile phones of staff were impacted.
A spokesperson for Australian Payments Plus said the Optus outage was not expected to affect the processing of Eftpos, BPay and NPP transactions that were executed by accountholders on Wednesday.
In an announcement last night, Optus said on its website that it was continuing to restore mobile and broadband services.
However, there was no acknowledgement of the outage on the company’s media portal as of 6pm last night.
The most recent announcement posted to the media portal was a 3 November press release highlighting retail excellence at one of the telco’s Melbourne stores.