Big Capitec outage
Capitec was hit by a significant service outage on Thursday and Friday — with online banking and mobile banking offline and complaints of problems using card payments and ATMs.
Several customers vented their frustration at the issues on Twitter and Downdetector.
The bank confirmed there were issues in a statement on its social media channels at around 09:30. It also sent SMSs to customers later in the morning.
“We are aware that some of our clients are experiencing issues on our app, Internet banking and USSD services,” Capitec stated. “We want to assure you that we are on it and doing everything possible to resolve the issue.”
The Capitec page on fault tracking website Downdetector showed that reports of issues first started from around 05:00.
Reports remained persistent throughout the day and were still high as of 15:30, as shown in the graph below.
Although the bank’s morning statement said that ATM and cards were working, several reports on Downdetector and Twitter claimed otherwise.
MyBroadband asked the bank for further details on the outage but did not receive feedback by the time of publication.
Initially, the problems were linked to MTN’s data network downtime in two provinces earlier in the day, but the mobile operator had since resolved this.
At the time, MyBroadband found it possible to log in to the Capitec app using our office’s Wi-Fi connection but not while connected to MTN’s network.
Even on MTN, this morning we could still go past the biometric authentication section before receiving an error.
However, attempting to log in via the app in the afternoon was not possible using either mobile data or Wi-Fi, with the message below displayed after tapping “Sign In”.
Update — Issues persist
Capitec has been unable to resolve the problems with its banking services for more than a day.
As of Friday morning at 07:30, Downdetector was still showing a large number of reports of issues.
The bank had not provided any further updates since its original statement on Thursday morning.
The graph below shows the number of reports on Downdetector late on Thursday evening and into Friday morning.
Update — Friday 08:00
Capitec has confirmed to MyBroadband that the problem is being caused by an infrastructure issue in the central servers that support its banking channels.
“We realise this is a terrible experience for our clients and apologise for the inconvenience if you have tried to make use of our banking app, USSD and Internet banking in the last 24 hours,” Capitec said.
“We are absolutely committed to resolving this as soon as possible and have a team of technology experts correcting the problem.”
The bank said customers could continue to make payments using cards and use ATMs.
Loading ...