Westpac online banking down for two hours following ATM failure last week

Following our note on Monday regarding Westpac experiencing technical issues with its ATM network, today the bank's online retail banking websites went down for two hours, hampering its customers from logging on to internet banking through it's main website. Westpac's tech systems have been criticised for lacking flexibility, with analysts predicting that more investment is needed to maintain them.

Westpac Banking Corp has restored its online retail banking websites after customers faced a two-hour outage on Wednesday morning, an inconvenience coming hot on the heels of the failure of the bank's ATM network on Sunday afternoon.

Westpac would not confirm how many customers were affected by "intermittent issues" on Wednesday which prevented them logging on to internet banking through the bank's main website home page.

Down again: Westpac online banking failed on Tuesday following ATM outages on Sunday. Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

Several Westpac customers turned to Twitter to vent their frustration. When one customer wrote, "@Westpac can you confirm that online banking is down. Have been unable to log in for over 45 min" a Westpac representative replied: "Hi Brendon, we're having intermittent issues with online banking & working quickly to restore services."

One Westpac retail customer told Fairfax Media when they tried to log in to internet banking about 9am on Wednesday, the page responded with this message: "This site can't be reached. The connection was reset. Try: Reloading the page; Checking the connection; Checking the proxy and firewall."