Tymebank, a fast-growing digital retail bank, experienced an intermittent outage between 17:02 -18:29 on Tuesday (July 25) and then a total outage from 18:29 – 19:02 due to a network connectivity issue, the bank said in response to BR questions yesterday.
Customers who transacted in the affected times would have experienced card declines, and, at times, this resulted in funds being deducted from their accounts for a short period, even when the transaction was unsuccessful.
All transactions are automatically verified overnight as per our standard operating process so funds would be automatically returned to the customers’ accounts. Any transactions that can’t be automatically verified overnight is then manually reconciled according to our normal operations process. We can confirm that both these processes were completed by 09:30 on Wednesday morning,” the bank said.
The bank said technology was not infallible, and “we apologise to all our customers who were inconvenienced as a result of the temporary glitch in our network connectivity. We can confirm that customers did not suffer any losses.”
The bank said this particular kind of event had not occurred before at their operations.
“We’ve had two short outages that were unrelated, and our tech team resolved the issues quickly without any customer funds being affected,” they said.
Some of the bank’s customers took to social media to complain on Tuesday evening, with, for instance, K.opangWa_le3asy (@Kopang68630038) commenting on Twitter: “what’s happening with Tymebank we cannot make transactions !!!” and EMMa (@MotherBucket) tweeted: “My son's savings DISAPPEARED from his TymeBank account and the bank said there was nothing they could do. What do you do if your money is not even safe at the bank?”
Eugene Eksteen (@eksteene) said: “Same issue. Card declined. I'm left embarrassed at the shops and @tymebank doesn't even have the decency to sms or notify us about the issue. I'm looking at other options now.”.
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