This week saw another major Australian company impacted by outage as the Commonwealth Bank (CBA) announced on the afternoon of Wednesday 12th February that its online payments service was suffering an outage. This halted the processing of millions of payments and left both shoppers and merchants financially stranded as thousands of merchants across the country are reported to have been left without the ability to process online payments due to the outage.
The impact has been major as CBA processes over 20 million payments every day.
In a short statement the bank stated that: “We are aware that one of our suppliers is having technical issues which may be having an intermittent impact on some customers’ ability to use our online payments solution BPOINT. As a result, some customers may be unable to process online payments via BPOINT. We are working with the supplier to resolve this issue as a matter of priority.“
The bank also stated in a later update that it was working with a third party to resolve the issue and that an investigation was underway.
While the bank’s BPOINT API and online payments were down, however, CBA’s app, credit and debit card transactions, NetBank and other services continued to operate normally.
The outage disclosure occured on the same day the bank reported a 6% increase in profits to $5.14 billion for the first half of the financial year. , The bank’s profit performance exceeded market expectations of $5.06 billion and its previous year earnings of $5.02 billion.
At 2pm AEDT on Thursday 13 February, 2025, the bank confirmed that “all BPOINT services have now been restored.” and apologised again “for any inconvenience this disruption may have caused to your business”..