Westpac hit by major online outage
Customers of Aussie bank Westpac have been unable to access their online accounts via desktop, mobile and tablet devices for more than nine hours.
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The service went down for all online users at around 10:00am Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST). By 7:00pm AEST mobile banking services were back up and running, according to the Australian, but the main site was still unavailable.
Westpac has been using its Twitter account to apologise to customers and tell them that they can use telephone banking to transfer funds and check balances. ATMs and point-of-sale terminals are also unaffected.
There are signs that things could soon be resolved - at pixel time, the bank says that services are "being fully restored":
Westpac, which like most Australian banks has suffered numerous technical glitches in recent years, is preparing to roll out new online and mobile banking platforms from Fiserv later this year.
Update: Westpac's woes extended into a second day after the initial fix fell over the following morning. The bank's systems crashed again from 9am to 4pm before normal service was resumed.
In a statement, the bank says: "We take systems reliability extremely seriously, are very disappointed by inconvenience to our customers and will undertake a thorough review."