An industry-wide outage of major payment service has left Aussies without pay and money, with complaints about the frustrating problem flooding social media.
The major outage of online bank transfer system Osko has created havoc for millions of Australian customers, leaving “an incredible amount of people with no money”.
The BPAY service normally allows users to near instantly make payments from one account to another, with most major banks like CommBank, ING, NAB, ANZ, and Westpac customers affected. The platform is used by the majority of Australian financial institutions.
The issues began at around 7pm on Wednesday night and the problem was fixed just after 3am AEDST. However, during the outage, those affected said money for the failed payments had been frozen mid-transfer and were unable to be used.
At around 11pm, ANZ alerted their customers of the issue and apologised “for the inconvenience. They said that while the bank’s ATM and EFTPOS facilities were still available during this time, failed payments would need to be resubmitted once the refunded funds were made available in their account.
“Hi everyone, we’re currently experiencing an industry-wide outage to New Payments Platform (NPP)/Osko payments made via Internet Banking, ANZ App and ANZ Plus,” they tweeted.
“The processing of some payments may be delayed and some payments may fail.”
On social media, fed-up Aussies complained to their banks that their payments weren’t being processed, or that they were missing their pay or salaries.
“This outage has been going on since 8pm and an incredible amount of people with no money,” one tweet read.
“My salary is not in my account and that has nothing to do with osko or payid, please explain?” one annoyed user tweeted CommBank.
“I’m so f***ing upset how is Osko going to be down. I feel so bad (because) I requested a commission and I haven’t been able to send the money (because) of it,” wrote another.
The outage had also caused major cashflow issues for others, with direct debit failing to process.
Tweeting Teacher’s Mutual Bank and ANZ, one user wrote: “The outage for osko payments means the money I sent myself to my @ANZ_AU account still hasn’t come in do any of you have an ETA when this will come in? I need to get groceries otherwise I’ll starve.”
Another ING customer wrote: “Are you going to reverse and pay any fees I’m charged as a result of the Osko outage and my direct debit failing and being changed fees by them?”
In response, representatives for the banks said the issue has been restored as of 7am Thursday.
CommBank advised one angry customer on Twitter not to retry their failed transactions, while the issue was being investigated.
As it stands, Osko has yet to make a statement through their social media platforms.
“The RBA is currently affected by an issue affecting OSKO payments, they’re looking into this and we will provide an update for our customers as soon as possible,” they wrote.
ING had a similar response.
“The OSKO system outage was restored just after 3am Sydney time and they are processing the backlog of payments,” they wrote.
“We’ve aware that an issue had been identified by the payment platform operators and was impacting all payments across Australian Financial Institutions,” a Westpac customer service representative wrote.