FNB hit by outage
First National Bank (FNB) customers are reporting problems with the bank’s card payment authentication system, which is preventing them from placing orders on Black Friday, 28 November 2025.
The problem may be related to an issue with the FNB mobile app, which intermittently displays a server error message when customers attempt to sign in.
“Request cannot be processed. We are unable to process your request at the moment. The cause is being investigated,” the error message states.
“We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Please try again later.”
Outage tracking service Downdetector shows that FNB customers began reporting issues from around 09:30 on Friday.
“FNB, what is wrong with your banking app? I can’t login. I need to process payments,” one customer said on Twitter/X.
“So annoying, I’ve made a double payment because of this nonsense,” said another.
“The FNB app is not down, however, due to the extraordinarily high volumes of transactions currently being experienced, some intermittent failures are being reported,” an FNB spokesperson told MyBroadband.
“As of 08:05 this morning, FNB has seen a 50% year-on-year increase in cumulative Virtual Card transactions for Black Friday.”
FNB said that while thousands of transactions continue to be processed, some customers may still experience intermittent access, but the matter is being closely managed to enhance capacity.
“All other channels are functioning at full capacity. We thank our customers for their support and apologise for any frustration caused,” it said.
Certain payment providers are allowing customers to use FNB’s fallback one-time PIN (OTP) authentication system.
While this significantly increases the time it takes to authenticate a transaction, it provides a way to circumvent the issues with the FNB app when approving payments.
TFG’s online shopping platform, Bash, has a notice in its app warning customers about FNB’s ongoing card payment problems.
“Some users may get a payment failure using FNB cards. Please try again or use another method,” it states.
Service outages in South Africa
This latest outage comes after FNB’s online stockbroking and portfolio management website experienced an extended outage in October 2025.
Customers contacted MyBroadband to report that they were unable to view their accounts or trade using the website for more than a day.
One reader said the service was intermittently available on Thursday, 16 October but completely unusable on Friday.
Following publication, FNB restored its trading platform’s online services and provided MyBroadband with feedback about the outage.
“FNB Stockbroking and Portfolio Management experienced intermittent trading platform disruptions between 16 and 17 October 2025, due to a temporary issue involving our third-party trading service provider,” it said.
“During this period, clients were still able to trade via the FNB Banking App and the trading desk. We can confirm that the platform has since been fully restored, and trading services are now operational.”
FNB was not the only company that recently experienced service disruptions. Much of the gov.za namespace went offline in October.
“One of our Internet breakout points situated in Centurion, Gauteng, experienced an outage,” a Sita spokesperson told MyBroadband.
Sita explained that the Internet link went down due to a cable break. The affected areas were diverted to the backup link, which became congested due to the additional traffic load.
This resulted in Domain Name System servers not resolving Internet addresses for most South African government departments.
Bank Zero experienced downtime in August after previously unannounced maintenance took longer than expected.
Medical aid titan Discovery experienced its second IT-related system outage in a week on Sunday, 12 October 2025.
Customers reported online that the Discovery app and website did not work. Users trying to access their Discovery Miles also encountered errors.
This comes after Discovery’s online platforms for its medical aid and insurance services suffered an outage on Monday, 6 October 2025. The Discovery Bank website and app were not impacted.
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