CommBank gifts some customers AU$50 following last week's network outage

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) has made a courtesy payment into the accounts of some customers who were unable to access funds over the weekend, due to the delay in payments resulting from Thursday's network outage.

The outage lasted 12 hours, with CBA saying its systems were back up and running on Friday, but some payments were still sitting unprocessed. Customers who didn't have their payments processed, and were out of pocket over the weekend, were sent AU$50 from the bank as an apology.

The funds were transferred with "Sorry from CBA" as the transaction description.

Up to 150,000 customers impacted are to expect the payment.

CBA said that following the outage it has made significant progress in processing any outstanding payments.

"We now believe funds should be in customer accounts," the bank wrote in an update posted on Wednesday morning. "If customers have any issues or questions regarding their payments they should contact our call centre or visit us in branch so we can assist.

The yellow bank said it is also refunding fees and charges associated to the network issue on Thursday for our customers who were impacted by this issue.

At the same time, the bank also issued a scam alert, saying that when contacting customers, it would not be asking for account details.

"If a customer is approached for their account details they should not provide this and the customer should let us know by phoning our call centre or visiting us in branch," the bank continued.

The bank on Thursday issued an apology to customers notifying them its systems were experiencing network issues.

It confirmed network issues had resulted in BPAY services, including PayID payments and cardless cash, being made unavailable, as well as some in-branch services, call centre services, CommBiz log on, and some CommBiz payments.

In addition, some debit card payments were affected, while the CommBank app and Netbank were still available, but with limited functionality.

A small number of branches had also closed as a result of the network issue.

In a tweet on Monday morning, CBA said the "large majority" of outstanding payments would be completed and in customers' accounts mid-morning, after the outage stretched to the weekend.

"We apologise to everyone who has been affected by the delay in payments and we are very sorry for the inconvenience it has caused," CBA said again on Wednesday.

For the 2019 financial year, Commonwealth Bank reported AU$8.6 billion in statutory net profit after tax, slipping 8.1% from the AU$9.3 billion that was recorded a year prior.

Operating expenses increased slightly for the bank by 2.5% to $11 billion. Of that amount, AU$1.9 billion was spent on information technology services, 8% more than FY18, primarily due to increased IT infrastructure costs, risk and compliance spend, and software license costs.

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