Commonwealth Bank Outage Frustrates Customers Amid Extended Maintenance
So, if you noticed people complaining online about Commonwealth Bank not working properly, you weren’t imagining it. Over the weekend, CommBank carried out what was supposed to be routine, planned maintenance — but it ended up lasting longer than expected, leaving thousands of customers frustrated.
Here’s what happened. The bank scheduled the outage for early Saturday morning, with the idea that by 9 a.m. everything would be back to normal. But instead, many customers woke up to find they couldn’t transfer money, make payments, or even properly access their accounts. Services weren’t fully restored until around 10:25 a.m. or later, and even then, there were delays with payments and transfers being processed.
The outage hit a lot of different services. The CommBank app and NetBank were both impacted, along with over-the-phone banking. People couldn’t top up their Travel Money cards, and international transfers were put on hold. Debit cards could still be used, though limits were temporarily reduced. Credit cards, at least, were unaffected. Business customers were also caught up in the disruption, with merchant settlement payments delayed until after the maintenance wrapped up.
Also Read:Now, to be fair, CommBank did notify its customers in advance. A message went out in the app days before, and a reminder was posted on social media on Friday. But let’s be honest — not everyone sees those alerts, and plenty of people were caught off guard. You could see that frustration spilling over online, especially with the timing. It was the first day of school holidays for many families, and some people pointed out that a weekend outage was far from ideal. Comments like “This is ridiculous” and “What a stupid time to do this” were shared widely.
And beyond the inconvenience, some real problems cropped up. A few customers shared stories of payments declining, only to later discover money had been deducted anyway. Others were worried because their pay hadn’t landed in their accounts when expected. One person even said they had to rely on cryptocurrency just to send money to friends overseas during the outage.
The bank did apologise, acknowledging that the maintenance dragged on longer than planned. A spokesperson reassured customers that all services were back up, though lingering delays in transfers would take the rest of the day to clear.
There’s also a word of warning here. Whenever outages like this happen, scammers often take advantage of the confusion. CommBank reminded everyone to be careful — the bank will never ask for your password, PIN, or send a link asking you to log in from a text or email. Some scammers use “spoofing” to make messages look like they’re coming from the bank, even showing up in the same text thread as legitimate ones. If something feels off, the advice is simple: stop, check, and don’t hand over personal details.
So, while everything is back online now, the weekend outage was definitely a reminder of just how dependent we all are on digital banking — and how quickly things can unravel when services go down, even for just a few hours.
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