Server patch blamed for Westpac outage

By Liz Tay on Sep 1, 2010 5:06 AM
Filed under Software

Back-up processes keep business customers online.

Westpac has blamed an overnight server upgrade for an online banking outage that lasted about nine hours yesterday.

The patch caused the page to respond too slowly to load for an estimated three quarters of the bank's retail customers between 7.30am and 4.30pm.

As of 1pm, the cause of the issue had not yet been identified. However, a spokesman said Westpac's support staff had "worked through the day to isolate the problem".

"It's all up and running as per normal," the spokesman told iTnews at 5pm yesterday. "There was an upgrade last night to a server. It did take longer to fix than usual."

The spokesman said the bank's back-up processes kept its business customers and 25 percent of retail customers from experiencing the outage.

"Our back-up systems ensured that it was business as normal for business customers," he said.

Westpac apologised to all affected customers.

Earlier this week, a "critical security change" at the Commonwealth Bank caused otherwise valid MasterCard and Visa transactions to be declined at point-of-sale terminals, and some machines on the bank's nationwide ATM network to malfunction.

The ANZ bank also experienced a "system outage" last Tuesday that left merchants unable to perform EFTPOS and credit card point-of-sale transactions between 11am and 1.30pm.

4 comments in this discussion

"If you have 1000+ physical branches (for reach/coverage and some redundancy), you'd think you could pay for two e-banking systems, so one upgrade doesn't put down your national network. I was ..."

By Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu)

Tags

westpac, outage, server, patch, financeit

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Comments: 4

hashkent Sep 1, 2010 7:49 AM	I see nothing has changed with the reliability of Westpac Internet Banking from when I was a customer 3 years ago!
llama9000 Sep 1, 2010 10:15 AM	@hashkent Pah. It's been working fine most of the time. Other banks had their downtime moments too, these things do happen. The downtime was like less than an hour, no biggie for the average folk like myself.
djzort Sep 1, 2010 6:12 PM	another example of why the ITIL model is complete rubbish
Graeme Harrison (prof at-symbol post.harvard.edu) Sep 1, 2010 7:59 PM	If you have 1000+ physical branches (for reach/coverage and some redundancy), you'd think you could pay for two e-banking systems, so one upgrade doesn't put down your national network. I was trying to do a Westpac online transaction during the outage, and there was NO warning screen that the system had problems. But the funniest thing of it all was that the customer-activity session-timeout does NOT add the typical bank system latency, so the bank was taking 15 minutes to refresh the screen, but the session monitor still kicks you off if you haven't done any new activity for five minutes! At a minimum, the calculation ought be session-timeout is SUM of bank-latency PLUS activity-threshold! Also, at a restaurant for lunch, the restaurant gave up on trying to get an EFTPOS transaction approved by Westpac, so the collapse was NOT limited to non-business customers! The banks have a major financial interest in keeping you out of the branches (ie dealing with a computer not a person) to max extent possible. They need full duplication of e-banking. Also the banks have a huge interest in retaining customers... yet the CBA and Westpac hopeless IT reliability of just past week proves that everyone needs a credit or debit card of at least two majors, just to be sure of doing a purchase without embarrassment...