Westpac pulls the plug on e-banking service - News

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Westpac pulls the plug on e-banking service

By Megan McAuliffe, ZDNet Australia
August 15, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/soa/Westpac-pulls-the-plug-on-e-banking-service/0,139023165,120254709,00.htm

Westpac has been forced to take down its Internet banking service on the back of a technical glitch, which caused significant disruptions to the service earlier this week.

The Internet banking service has been inaccessible to customers for more than 24 hours, while the bank rushes to identify the system fault and restore the facility.

In the last week, 100,000 online customers were reported to have experienced a listless service or could not log on at all, forcing the bank to pull the site offline in order to locate the source of the problem.

Westpac refuses to reveal the cause of the system error.

-We're upgrading the level of code in the servers so that the computers can talk to each other," Westpac's David Lording told ZDNet.

The bank is unsure of when the service will be up and running for customers again.

Westpac Banks Internet service problem follows a recent ZDNet Australia report that the Commonwealth Bank's online banking system was allegedly brought down as a result of a security breach.

Following the attack on the Commonwealth Bank's Internet service, an Australian security analyst said that a staggering 20 banks were victims of hackers in the last year alone.