Standard Bank outage: Fin24 users left fuming

Johannesburg - Customers of Standard Bank have written in to Fin24 to tell of their frustrations over the bank’s internet and mobile app glitch.

Services linked to Standard Bank’s internet and mobile app offerings were down on Monday amid a “system outage”.

READ: Technical glitch hits Standard Bank website, app

“Standard Bank is currently experiencing slow responses on some of its banking platforms,” said the bank in a statement on Monday.

“Customers will have noticed that internet banking and our app banking platform is currently not available. Also impacted is the customers’ ability to do transactions at Standard Bank branches. However, customers can still perform transactions at any of our ATM’s and point of sale devices.  

Standard Bank went on to apologise to customers over the inconvenience caused.

But customers have said the damage is already done.

Fin24 user Lance van den Heever-Liebenberg explained how the downtime affects his travel business:

“Well, Standard Bank offline for our business has the potential to devastate us. We are a travel management company and our bookings are all time-sensitive (when booking airline seats and the like we are given deadlines by when we have to confirm and pay or the fare goes up). We are currently working on group bookings for our large corporates and unable to process airline tickets for the group - the problem with this is that we have quoted and invoiced the client and the payments have been broken down into multiple payments to allow us to issue the tickets. Without access to our bank account, we are unable to determine which tickets have been paid for and therefore which tickets to issue. This applies to our leisure clients as well. The thing is we become liable for the difference in fare (between what is quoted and what will be available when we are finally able to process payments) and this impacts profitability (and in the instance of huge group bookings could spell bankruptcy if we as the travel agent are not able to convince the airlines to extend the fare guarantee).

The fact that Standard Bank did not contact clients via sms or email until 12h00 today is also unacceptable - we should have been notified the moment there was a problem as this allows us to have extra time to put contingency plans in place.

Another business owner and Fin24 user, Forrester de Beer, also explained how the outage has hit his business:

“We are are a small business trying to make and receive payments, this is not the first time this has happened. Standard Bank is not communicating to any of use; I have not received an sms or anything from them. We receive lots of unnecessary junk mail, but when the chips are down no communication is forthcoming.”

Fin24 user Gene Hayden said that this is not the first that Standard Bank has allegedly had technical problems:

“Standard Bank’s Internet banking glitches have been on-going every month end for the past few months. They must have big system problems there, so much so that we are seriously thinking of closing our account and switching to another bank. Very, very unprofessional!”