Dear Westpac. Please fix your internet banking, it has been buggered all day. Thanks,” wrote Twitter user Nola James.
Bank spokesman David Lording confirmed the problem.
“I understand that there was a patch upgrade with the servers last night and that caused the difficulty,” Mr Lording said.
He said Westpac’s IT team had reverted the changes made and that the service was now operating normally.
For most of the day the bank’s servers were running at about 25 per cent capacity, Lording said, causing degradation to occur when Westpac’s customers attempted to access their account.
“There was some access available, but they put in a patch last night and it had to be backed out. So the system was still operating but it was operating at a sub-optimal level,” he said.
He said the downtime was not security related.
Lording also said he wanted to apologise to affected customers.
The company earlier acknowledged the issue on Twitter.
“Yes there is intermittent problems with Internet Banking, it’s being worked on, try again in a little while,” Westpac wrote to its Twitter followers this morning.
Throughout the day the company continued to address user concern: “… Assure you we’re working on it, service is degraded so keep trying and you should be able to get on,” it said.
Source:http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/westpac-blames-software-patch-for-downtime-20100831-14f95.html
