This is the second time that customers have experienced problems with the service in the last two days, with Westpac corporate affairs saying the bank made the decision to take the service offline at 10.30 am.
"It was removed from service by our staff voluntarily because customers were experiencing downgraded service," Westpac corporate affairs spokesperson, Julia Quinn, told ZDNet Australia.
Whilst it apologised to customers for the service failure, the bank was unable to tell them when it would return. It was restored late this afternoon.
In this instance, the downgraded service left some customers unable to get through to the online banking facility while others experienced delays attempting to process transactions.
The bank's IT department is still trying to diagnose the exact cause of the online service's problems, but believes it can narrow them down to faults in its customer queuing system.
Yesterday aspects of the online banking service were affected by technical difficulties experienced across the bank.
The bank is still unable to determine whether yesterday's events are related to those of today.
Westpac's Internet banking site was working fine until it outsourced its IT Operations to both Telstra and IBM Global Services.
Since then, it has had approximately 4 system downtimes affecting customers. This is just not good enough and one wonders whether the two companies (Telstra and IBM Global) have any idea as to what they are doing.