Westpac customers were rendered unable to access their bank accounts online for around eight hours yesterday and its crisis comms strategy should prove instructive for the likes of Optus.
The bank began posting regular updates on X (you may know it better as Twitter) around 9pm AEDT yesterday through to around 5.15am this morning. The bank acknowledged the failure in its service and profusely apologised to customers.
Many users reported logging into the app to find a bank balance of zero dollars. Others seemed to have had their cards erased.
“We’re aware that customers are currently experiencing issues accessing account information in online and mobile banking”, the company posted.
“Our teams are working to fix the issue. We apologise for any inconvenience and will continue to share updates here”.
We want to apologise to all our customers who were impacted by the issue overnight. We recognise this took too long to resolve and we thank customers for their patience. If there’s anything we can do to help from here, please feel free to send us a DM. (2/2) ^Ana
— Westpac Bank (@Westpac) December 4, 2023
Users trying to sign in on the bank’s website were met with the message “Westpac Online Banking is currently unavailable”.
At 5.17am, the bank posted that its services had been restored and were running as usual.
“We want to apologise to all our customers who were impacted by the issue overnight. We recognise this took too long to resolve and we thank customers for their patience”, it added.
Of course, Optus’ situation was made all the worse as its customers were unable to receive the updates that it was sending because the Optus network was down.
Still, a quick apology was not in the offing for Optus, which issued its first statement at 6.33am on the day of the breach, after its media hotline had received some 20 calls between 4-6am and its media team having been “empowered” to issue comms via prepared statements.
