‘Widespread impact’: Banks back online after nationwide tech outage
A range of banks, including big four lenders Commonwealth Bank, Westpac and ANZ, are scrambling to find the source of an outage that is affecting internet banking and access to online apps across the country.
Commonwealth Bank used Twitter to apologise for the outage and thank customers for their patience. “We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating,” CBA posted on Thursday afternoon.
CBA customers said internet banking and the online app were down, but other services such as Apple Pay were still available. One hour later, CBA provided an update: “We are starting to see services return to normal following a tech outage that had widespread impact across businesses… We’re sorry to cause any inconvenience to your afternoon.”
Westpac customers, including those who bank with St George and Bank of Melbourne, also reported being unable to access internet banking services in what is understood to be a “major telecommunications outage”.
ANZ has confirmed some impact from the outage, but was unable to provide further details.
Customers of boutique lender ME bank also took to Twitter, saying “online banking is down too”.
Macquarie Bank confirmed some customers were experiencing difficulty accessing accounts because of a network outage on Thursday afternoon.
National Australia Bank’s internet banking services appeared to be working unaffected.
Virgin Australia also reported an outage on Thursday afternoon, but it’s unclear if it’s linked to the problems with banking services.
It’s understood an internal fault at web services company Akamai, which occurred about 3pm AEST on Thursday, is the source of the problem. Akamai runs one of the world’s biggest content delivery networks, or CDNs, platforms that make the internet faster and more stable by making information available across many locations.
Akamai was contacted for comment.
Last week an internal outage at Fastly, another leading CDN, took down global news sites and retailers for almost an hour. That was caused by a coding error and resulted in major websites, including The New York Times, BBC, The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, going offline.
Cyber attacks have spiked during COVID-19 as hackers preyed on workers who are vulnerable to phishing scams.
The two recent high-profile cyber attacks against meat-processing company JBS and Georgia-based Colonial Pipeline both ended with multimillion-dollar ransoms being paid after hackers froze computer systems and brought operations to a halt.
ANZ chief information security officer Lynwen Connick recently said companies should avoid paying ransom and pointed to work being completed by the government and private companies to develop a digital platform to share information quickly and securely about cyber attacks and threats.
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Charlotte is a reporter for The Age.
Tim is the editor of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald technology sections.
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