A major tech outage at Westpac has left thousands of Australians unable to access their money through the app or online banking.
Over 7,000 complaints were reported on the tech monitoring site Downdetector on Monday afternoon.
Westpac has acknowledged the issue and is actively working to fix it.
‘We’re aware that customers are experiencing issues accessing online and mobile banking,’ the bank said in a statement.
‘Our teams are working to fix the issue. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.’
Many Australians have reported being unable to access their money due to the issue.
‘It happened right when everyone was going to lunch. I needed to transfer money as I filter everything through my main account but couldn’t do the transfer and hence couldn’t get lunch,’ one said.
Another said the issue had stopped her from getting Oasis tickets.
A major Westpac tech outage has caused the app and online banking to stop working for thousands of Australians, leaving them unable to access their money
Westpac said it was working to resolve the issue
‘Had the tickets reserved – went to my Westpac app to get my credit card details…. error…error….error. Not happy.’
‘Stuck at the fuel station and I can’t pay, please hurry up,’ a third added.
Others pointed out the incident highlighted the challenges that come with Australia’s shift toward becoming a cashless society.
Despite the increasing number of Australians opting for cashless transactions both in stores and online, Swinburne University business professor Steve Worthington stated that cash will remain essential, especially in light of outages like todays.
‘Cash can’t crash,’ he told AAP earlier this year.
‘When the telecoms break down or the IT systems of the banks break down, you’re left high and dry.’
The outage comes just days after the bank ended cardless cash withdrawals, forcing customers to use a physical bank card to withdraw money from an ATM.
‘As part of continually reviewing our products and services, Westpac will no longer offer the cardless cash withdrawal feature,’ Westpac announced.
The bank claimed the change was part of a continual review into its ‘products and services’.
It stressed that customers will still be able to make cash withdrawals from Westpac ATMs across Australia as long as they use their physical card, and cash transactions can also be made at branches across the country.
Westpac confirmed that cardless cash deposits would still be available to customers.
Customers were furious about change, with many claiming ending cardless cash withdrawals ‘seemed like a backward step’.
‘Like a lot of people I don’t carry a physical card with me anymore, so cardless cash is really my only option if I need cash unexpectedly. Seems like a backward step,’ one wrote.
Westpac has announced it is shutting down its cardless cash withdrawal service
One Aussie, who claimed to work at Westpac, explained the service was removed due to an ‘insanely high’ amount of fraud and scam incidents.
‘I work for Westpac at the branch level and the reason we removed them is the number of fraud and scam incidents happening with this ability was insanely high. Like 1000 in the past month,’ they claimed.
‘Furthermore, there are actually only around 4,000 cardless cash withdrawals a week nationally which is a drop in the bucket for overall branch transactions.
‘It’s just too much of a pain in the a*** to administer at branch level with the frauds and scams and too many people exploiting other people’s internet banking to get the SMS code to extract money.’
