CBA lunchtime outage shutters some branches

Commonwealth Bank of Australia customers have encountered another outage around lunchtime on Thursday, with NetBank users experiencing what appears to be intermittent difficulties logging in and accessing their accounts online.

The bank confirmed the issues on social media around midday, apologising and saying that it is urgently investigating the glitch.

It is understood ATMs and eftpos services are working, however some Netbank functions are out.

"Due to this incident some of our branches have temporarily closed," the CBA said in a statement.

Services affected appear to be some BPAY transactions within the CommBank app and NetBank, Cardless Cash, some in-branch functions and some inbound call centre services.

We are currently experiencing an issue affecting some of our services. We are urgently investigating this and we’re sorry for any inconvenience caused. We will provide further updates here.

— CommBank (@CommBank) October 17, 2019

Hungry customers quickly pounced on the timing of the outage standing in between them and a feed.

RIP , who else is starving?

Does this happen at @ANZ_AU ?

— Mo_Ventor (@VentorMo) October 17, 2019

I’m at school and I’m hungry. You’re the reason I can’t have lunch. THANKS ��������

— Tara (@Tara06065754) October 17, 2019

Can't even get lunch you peasants

— Benjy__ (@Benjy15462112) October 17, 2019

Thursday is the worst possible day for an outage for many customers and their banks because it coincides with major payroll batch drops from both employers and the government into many people's accounts.

Those deposits are also often linked to scheduled BPAY or direct deposit payments that are used to pay consumer and household bills when they fall due so that they do not attract late payment penalties or lose discounts for prompt payments.

In a recent interview with iTnews, BPAY's general manager of product, scheme and business development, Keith Brown, confirmed Thursday was the the busiest day of the week because of scheduled payments.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), which monitors and collects data on bank outages, has first hand experience of the white knuckle ride a Thursday glitch can take bank operations staff on.

When the RBA suffered its own rare outage back in August 2018 because of a total electrical shutdown caused by an errant fire control system test, the central bank came perilously close to missing a pension run.

In the meantime, CBA's customers are wearing their frustrations on their sleeves.

Can you hurry up and fix this. I want access to my money.

— Dave (@DaveBotton) October 17, 2019

More to come.