FNB struck down by major outage affecting payments, ATMs and online banking

UPDATE – 14:47 – 23 August: In a swift turn of events, FNB already claims to have solved issues causing considerable downtime for its customers, according to a post on the bank’s X account.

ORIGINAL: Why is it always a Friday? First, it was CrowdStrike, and now it’s First National Bank’s (FNB) turn to drop the ball. The bank has been struck down by an outage affecting clients nationwide — crippling its major services, and disallowing customers to log into their banking app or make payments, digitally or physically. ATMs too, appear to be causing issues.

FNB has officially responded to the mass panic gripping clients via a post on X – stating “We are aware that there are issues being experienced across our channels. Our IT teams are working on restoring full functionality to the affected services. We apologise to our valued customers for the inconvenience caused.”

Now what? Now we wait

Users first began reporting issues with FNB as of 12h30 on Friday, 23 August according to downdetector.co.za. The three most common incidents reported involved issues surrounding “online banking”, “mobile banking”, and “online login”.

Customers attempting to log into their FNB mobile banking app or visit the FNB banking website were met with a “request could not be processed” error message, and were invited to try again later. One Stuff employee, however, was able to log into the FNB mobile app after two attempts – meaning the issues are somewhat irregular.

Another user on X (@ubuntu101za) was seemingly able to enter his account through FNB’s website at 13h12, a splash screen appeared, noting that “due to system maintenance, functionality on your Banking profile is limited.” It went on to say that payments may not reflect in transaction history immediately and that customers should contact FNB before attempting to make the same payment again to avoid any duplication.