Incumbent institution Commonwealth Bank of Australia and hot neo banking startup Chime have both been in the wars, suffering online banking outages that have left customers in the dark for over 24 hours.
App-based bank Chime went down on Wednesday, and at the time of writing remains unable to process debit card payments made by its five million customers. It's most recent Tweet on the issue, posted at 6am GMT, reads:
The downtime - its third since July - comes at a sensitive moment for the five-year old outfit, which is embarking on a new funding round that would boost its valuation to $5 billion.
The outage was apparently caused by an issue with the database of payment processor Galileo - another hot fintech company which has just raised $77 million in new funding. The Salt Lake City, Utah-based software company said it began experiencing an “operational incident” on Tuesday affecting its ability to “support transactions for a small number of our clients and their customers.”
Meanwhile in Auatralia, Commonwealth Bank has apologised to customers after a systems upgrade went awry, leaving users unable to access BPAY payments, CBA’s Netbank internet platform and its app. Call centre and in-branch services were also affected, with some branches forced to shut for the afternoon.
In a statement, the bank says: "We have been working to restore the network systems overnight and these are now returning to normal. Some payments may be delayed appearing in accounts.
"We are working through the backlog as quickly as possible, but rest assured all payments both into and out of customer accounts will be properly processed.
"Our branches will open as per normal today (many until 5pm). ATMs and EFTPOS are operating as normal. There may be delays to our contact centres and we thank customers for their patience. We have brought in additional staff to serve customers to assist with any outstanding issues."