An IT glitch at Commonwealth Bank of Australia has left customers unable to use online and mobile banking, ATMs and point-of-sale terminals for several hours.
The network-wide outage hit this morning, leaving thousands unable to access their accounts, withdraw cash and pay for goods in-store. Phone banking, the CommSec share trading platform and even some in-branch services were all hit.
The inevitable social media backlash soon materialised as miserable customers took to Twitter and Facebook to vent their frustration:
The bank used its Twitter account to reveal that it had identified the cause of the problem and by lunchtime claimed to have restored all services, although it admitted that not everything was running smoothly:
Today's problems come just days after CommBank managed to irritate customers through its reaction to the Heartbleed bug.
On Thursday Drew Unsworth, GM for digital and online banking, posted a blog designed to reassure customers. "I'm happy to report that our customers can rest assured we are patched against the 'Heartbleed' bug and you do not need to change your NetBank password," wrote Unsworth.
However, worried users commenting on blog were left confused as to whether the bank had always been secure against Heartbleed.
"What a terrible blog post, you tell us there is no need to change our passwords, on the other hand you say you are patched against the Heartbleed bug implying you were affected," wrote one.
Finally, after days of posting the same unclear reply to comments, CommBank added an update confirming that "NetBank does not (and did not) use OpenSSL".