First National Bank has warned that connectivity problems — which started at the weekend — are expected to stretch into Monday.
On Sunday, FNB customers turned to social media to complain that cards weren’t working at point of sale machines, ATMs were offline and the bank’s app was inoperable.
Later on Sunday, FNB apologised for the connectivity issues and said “the problem has since been resolved and all services are up and running as normal”.
But on Monday morning, the bank warned that it’s connectivity woes are actually not yet over.
“Unfortunately, we did everything yesterday and we got some stability and this morning we found that there was a different problem that occurred with similar symptoms,” FNB’s chief information officer, Mo Hassem, said by phone on Monday morning.
“We think we’re going to have some problems today, but we’ve got all the experts on site, we’ve got everybody on site working on the problem, working hard to restore and stabilise the services as soon as possible.
“So, I think we’re just going to go out there and say, you know, we are having some issues, and we’re working very hard to restore that,” Hassem said.
The bank plans to communicate with the public about when these issues will be resolved exactly, Hassem said.
The FNB glitch that occurred on Sunday was sparked off by a network upgrade, explained Hassem.
“What they normally do is they switch our services over to provide services to customers and then they switch back to the normal environment,” Hassem said.
“Everything was going fine until about I think it was 1pm when we discovered a problem on one of the network devices. That caused a significant dip. So, it didn’t take down services — it just caused connectivity problems,” Hassem added.
Meanwhile, the FNB Connect mobile network also experienced downtime on Sunday as the bank sent texts to customers warning of “intermittent data and calling issues”.
But Hassem said the issues affecting FNB Connect were separate to the banking connectivity problems experienced over the weekend.
In the meantime, Hassem said FNB attempts to generally maintain a high uptime rate.
“So far we’ve got a very high availability rate in the 99%, around about there,” Hassem said.
Update: FNB said on Monday afternoon that the intermittent connectivity issued had been fixed.
