Where’s Wally: Westpac Edition.
Where’s Wally: Westpac Edition.
September 5, 2007: They might not call their website Wally, but Westpac’s website and online banking services were well and truly lost. The online banking system is back online however the front page is still missing in action.
Hundreds of thousands of customers were affected by the outage and with the main Westpac site still down a day later, it begs the question of what is causing such a prolonged recovery time. The only way to access the online banking system when it first came back up was to use the direct link http://online.westpac.com.au as opposed to going to the main Westpac site and clicking the net banking link, which is what the majority of customers would be used too.
The trouble didn’t stop at just the online services yesterday, with a Crikey report claiming Westpac's entire online banking system had been down since 8am, including several ATMs in the south of Sydney.
Online banking is being pushed as the avenue of choice for banking operations, much like automatic teller machines were being pushed onto customers to reduce the in branch time tellers faced. Added to this is the increasing number of purely online accounts being released by the major bank, with no in branch access whatsoever. This means that when such a lengthy outage lands, businesses relying on the online services can be severely disadvantaged and waste unnecessary time.
At the time of writing this article Westpac’s main site is still down, however a message informing customers where to access the online banking system has been placed on the front. Unfortunately Westpac were not immediately available for comment regarding this outage.