Arguably, the most important day to belong to a functioning bank is today, 28 November – AKA Black Friday – when prices are at their lowest. It seems First National Bank (FNB) didn’t get the memo, with users across the country reporting errors with the bank’s card payment authentication system as they attempt to drain their accounts in the hopes of snagging some cheaper stuff.
FNB breaks the bank
Stuff’s own Duncan Pike and Sally Hudson experienced troubles when attempting to access the FNB banking app and website. “The website goes nowhere,” said Hudson as she attempted to pay someone at 10h54 on the morning of Black Friday, 28 November. Downdetector shows errors flooding in from around 09h16 onwards this morning.
“We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Please try again later.” Expect to see those words plastered everywhere today as FNB customers air out their feelings toward the bank on social media. Around 78% of the errors reported on Downdetector involve the bank’s app, while a further 16% experienced issues with ‘online banking’.
The exact cause of the outage isn’t yet known, though it’s likely linked to an increased spend across the bank’s systems as it attempts to keep up with the Black Friday demand. Stuff has reached out to FNB to try and determine the cause behind the outage, as well as when customers can expect to see a return to order.
UPDATE (28/11/25, 11h53): An FNB spokesperson has responded to Stuff, claiming that the FNB app is not down, but that some customers are experiencing “intermittent failures,” while “thousands” aren’t experiencing issues. It appears some users are now able to log in to the banking app, while others are still being booted out, indicating that some services are returning.
Read the full response below:
“The FNB app is not down, however, due to the extraordinarily high volumes of transactions currently being experienced, some intermittent failures are being reported while thousands are still being successfully processed. The matter is being closely managed, and we apologise to our customers for any inconvenience,” it said.
“All other channels are functioning at full capacity.”
1 Comment
This was not just a matter of the APP being down. The BANK was compromised in some way. Because I tried to draw a few thouosand from a Shoprite till in CT – and it declined on the till but it took the money from my account….. I’m STILL WAITING FOR IT TO COME BACK TO MY ACCOUNT. Absolutely NO RESPONSE from FNB. Nada. WTF.