Commonwealth Bank has come in for another pummelling from customers on social media after the bank’s online and mobile banking systems suffered a six-hour service outage across Australia on Sunday.
Hundreds of CBA account holders began reporting problems making contactless card transactions and online payments on Sunday morning and these were acknowledged officially by the bank at around 1pm.
CBA advised on its website that cards and mobile wallets could not be used to initiate contactless transactions on merchant terminals operated by other banks.Customers were advised to insert plastic debit and credit cards into terminals to complete instore payments.
However, customers directed angry social media messages at the bank for not recognising the problems they were also experiencing trying to execute online payments.
The bank’s website and Twitter pages advised customers to withdraw cash from ATMs, which offered little utility to online shoppers in lockdown states.
Many of the customers venting against the bank on social media throughout the afternoon were householders in lockdown areas trying to order groceries from major supermarkets.
Customer frustration was compounded by protracted wait times to access the bank’s call centre staff, which blew out to more than an hour on Sunday afternoon.
CBA’s unstable digital banking platforms have been a regular news item throughout 2021.
According to the Down Detector website the bank has suffered 33 separate service incidents this calendar year – easily the most of any Australian bank.
Moreover, the high frequency of incidents is undermining customer confidence in the bank’s systems because many resulted in service interruptions of more than five hours.
Despite having the industry’s most outage-prone systems this year, CBA continues to issue press releases highlighting its alleged “leadership” of digital banking in Australia.
There is now an unedifying gulf between the way the bank wants to market its digital performance through its media and marketing channels and the real-world experiences of its customers.
The wave of outages at the bank this year has not elicited any public reactions from the country’s banking and payments regulators – APRA and the Reserve Bank’s Payments System Board.
After its August board meeting the PSB declared that the payments system had “coped well” during the pandemic.
The regulator failed to acknowledge any damage wrought by CBA’s faltering platforms to retail customers and businesses.
Also, the wider issue of service outages in the industry was not examined by the PSB’s review of the payments system in the last two years.