Chris Meistre

On Sunday, 4 October 2009, I tried to log into my FNB online account to transfer money into my account before debit orders go off.  Instead I was greeted with a message to say that they’re offline.  I didn’t worry too much, because this was just one of the many times I couldn’t log in on a Sunday.

Monday morning came and I still couldn’t log on.  It’s now 19:30, 32.5 hours later, and I still cannot log into FNB.  Instead they are advising me “We apologise for Online Banking not being available to use currently. Our support team is attending to the problem. As an alternative you can use Cellphone Banking.”

I’ve never registered for cellphone banking and was told that I need to phone them to activate it.  After phoning the number 3 times and getting cut off after holding for about 20 minutes each time I gave up.  What has gone so terribly wrong that they have to be down for so long?

Not only could I not do inter account transfers to make sure my personal accounts have enough money for debit orders, but I’ve had to delay sending stock to clients because I couldn’t confirm proof of payments.  This resulted in at least 2 orders being canceled today.

Surely if it’s an upgrade that went wrong they can restore from a backup or at least have a roll back feature?  And I’m sure it doesn’t take 32.5 hours to find out what the problem is, especially if it’s in house software.

And up to now, no one is able to give any indication of when it will be fixed.

I’m not the only that is pissed off by this.  It only takes a Google search of FNB for updates in the last 24 hours or a search on Twitter to see people are not happy.  I am sure though that all this anger just falls on deaf ears, because the banks have us by the balls.