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PETER MEECHAM / STUFF
Westpac New Zealand chief executive David McLean said the bank was conducting a thorough review to find out what brought about the wide-spread systems outage on Monday.
Westpac chief executive David Mclean has apologized to customers for Monday’s extended failure of the bank’s payment systems.
He said a review was underway to find out what caused the “outage” to its eftpos payments, website, online banking and contact center.
“Yesterday we experienced a serious and extended technology systems issue that left many of you unable to do your banking, including making and receiving payments,” McLean told customers in an email just before 6pm.
“We know that this outage caused a lot of inconvenience to our customers.
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“It also occurred during a difficult time for many New Zealanders, who are feeling the health and financial impacts of COVID-19.
“This incident will have created extra stress and anxiety for many of you, and I’m deeply sorry for this.”
Customers started experiencing problems in the early afternoon, and at 2.30pm, the bank acknowledged the issue with a message on its Facebook page.
Some customers posting angry comments saying they had not been able to pay for their supermarket shopping as a result of the failure.
Others complained that Westpac could have notified them of the system failure before they headed out to the shops.
“The problem occurred early in the afternoon and affected many of our systems including our website, online banking and contact center,” McLean said.
“It also affected some card services, and caused delays to payments. Although we pride ourselves on our robustness and reliability, and we have well-tested backup plans, our systems are large and complex and this issue took a long time to resolve.
“Our staff worked through the night to resolve the issue, and our systems were back up and running by this morning.”
Westpac was working to understand what had caused the system failure.
“We want to assure you that a thorough review is under way to understand the causes of this outage to ensure it doesn’t happen again,” McLean said.
Stuff
At 6.29pm Monday, Westpac posted on its Facebook page that it had got its systems back up and running.
He said the bank had listened to customers’ feedback.
Over 4200 customers left messages on Westpac’s Facebook page.
“Seriously, it’s about time EFTPOS Systems were upgraded to report ‘Westpac System Down’ or something similar instead of the uninformative ‘Declined’,” customer Deklan Martin told the bank.
Pearl Davies posted: “I’m so happy I’m not the only one I just waited 45 mins in the supermarket to pay for my shopping for it to be declined.”
Another shopper, Ria Mana, posted her frustration at not being told what was happening at around 3pm.
“So where is the update Westpac. It is shopping day and I have a house full of kids to feed and I can’t pay for my shopping even tho ‘there is money in there. Not happy at all.”
Some customers tried to contact the bank by phone, but struggled to get through.
“After ringing the call center and being told a five minute wait, it’s been almost an hour,” Aurelia Rose posted. “Phone banking isn’t working, app isn’t working and even your site won’t load. I’m not happy at all.
Other customers felt Westpac should have a system of text notifications to alert customers when its payment systems were down so they didn’t head out to the shops.
Ioan Bramhall said: “It would be helpful to be notified of this sort of issue. I have just driven 20km to the supermarket and can’t shop. An estimated time would be useful.”
“Perhaps next time send a text, if possible, so we can plan around this as opposed to panicking?” said Audrey Hill.
Westpac responded saying it had been unable to send out text notifications too.
“Unfortunately our Contact Center is down so we’ve been unable to notify people. We’re working on it though!” the bank posted on its Facebook account.
