Commonwealth Bank hit by outage

Commonwealth Bank hit by outage

Customers of Commonwealth Bank Australia (CommBank) have been left frustrated after a series of major outages left them unable to access their bank accounts.

The problems started at 8am Australian time when customers found their credit card balances missing from their online banking accounts and smartphone apps.

The issues have escalated as the day has gone on with customers reportedly left without wages and unable to use their credit cards while merchants have found a number of transactions have not gone through. 

Unsurprisingly, irate customers took to social media to vent their frustrations and chronicle their complaints, from being left red-faced at supermarket checkout counters to being unable to eat at McDonalds and stranded on public transport.

Meanwhile due to the problems affecting merchant services, one small business owner complained that he had "a fair few angry customers at my place of work". 

As of 7.00pm Australian time, the problem had not been fully resolved although the bank did issue a statement to customers on its Facebook site.

"We're aware some customers may be experiencing intermittent issues with NetBank, CommBank app and CommBiz," it read.

"We know that some merchant terminals are also impacted. For our customers impacted by this issue we are sorry, please be assured we are working on this as a matter of priority. We'll keep you updated as new information comes to light."

As of yet no cause has been given for the outage and no estimate of when the problem will be fixed has been given.

CommBank customers will be hoping that the issue is resolved sooner than the last major outage suffered by the bank, back in September 2015 when they were unable to access all of their banking services for 18 hours. 

 





Comments: (6)

Hitesh Thakkar
Hitesh Thakkar - SME - Fintech startups (APAC and Africa) - India 04 April, 2018, 15:19Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

What ahppens to those millions of dollars spent on Business Countinuity and Disaster Recovery investment made by the bank. For Outage period of 8 am to 7 pm which is around 11 hours. 

We design application and Infra landscape for RPO RTO of less than 5 to 10 mins or lesser but, never get clue on those systems being fired for use in such critical outage.

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 04 April, 2018, 16:13Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Having Disaster Recovery is one thing but it needs to be regularly tested to prove it actually works if it is ever needed.  The outage in this case seems unusually excessive (a large Issuer-Acquirer in the UK, for example, can normally switch from Production to DR in between 7 and 15 minutes).

There also needs to be a sense of realism in expectations and requirements.  Having exceptionally low RPO/RTO and very High Availability (e.g. 99.9999%) comes at significant cost - there is normally a balancing exercise to find the happy medium.

Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 04 April, 2018, 19:03Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Millions of dollars are not enough for ACTIVE:ACTIVE configuration required to deliver Five 9 uptime. For a Top 10 global bank, the budget for Five 9s for its payment hub alone ran into a couple of tens of millions of dollars. In all likelihood, the cost for a megabank to achieve Five 9s for the entire IT landscape including CBS would be ~$100M. While talking about high uptime, it's customary to point to Google, Amazon and Facebook. I read somewhere that their total infra cost runs into billions of dollars.

Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 05 April, 2018, 10:06Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

Just stumbled onto this TC article: AWS launches a cheaper single-zone version of its S3 storage service.

Two takeaways:

  1. Max. availability possible for single-zone is 99.5%
  2. 99.5% availability means downtime of 1-2 days / year.

This is true for AWS. Can anyone enlighten whether the same is true for other infra?

A Finextra member
A Finextra member 05 April, 2018, 10:561 like 1 like Would a single zone be acceptable for high availability architecture? I would assume not (SPoF)? Tier 2 FI’s normally are prepared to accept 99.8% to 99.98% availability. Tier 1’s tend to shoot for 99.999% to 99.9999% but without significant (and continued) investment this is often hard to achieve in practice although I have heard of certain Issuer-Acquirers going 36 months or more at 100% (bearing in mind scheduled downtime for maintenance is measured outside this).
Ketharaman Swaminathan
Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 05 April, 2018, 13:25Be the first to give this comment the thumbs up 0 likes

@MattScott: TY for the figures. On a side note, when I published Why Does Cash Still Rule Ecommerce In India? last year, I strongly doubted if any Issuer / Acquirer in India had >90% availability! I'm sure the uptime has increased in the interim period since card payment success rates have gone up from the 60% figure prevailing at the time.

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