Digital payment outages in Australia are lasting longer, impacting consumers and businesses.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has reported that while the number of outages has decreased, the length of these disruptions has increased, particularly for online banking and fast money transfers. 

The findings were detailed in the RBA's Reliability of Retail Payment Services report, which showed that outages on Mondays took the longest to resolve.

Drawing on data from payment providers dating back to 2012, the report focused on significant outages lasting more than 30 minutes. 

Although incidents have fallen, especially in early 2024, the average duration has not improved. 

Fast transfer and ATM outages lasted more than two hours, and next-day transfer issues took nearly eight hours to fix.

The report followed a series of outages at Westpac and its subsidiaries, including St George and BankSA, which left many customers unable to access their accounts online.

Researchers Jared Griffiths and Matthew Joyce identified third-party system problems and technology platform failures as the leading causes of outages. 

Monday outages took the longest to address due to weekend system changes, which often delay resolution into the new week.

“Every incident or outage can potentially cause inconvenience or economic harm for end-users,” the report said.

Despite this, retail payment services maintained an average availability of 99.8 per cent per quarter.

Fast payments and online banking experienced the most outages, with root causes linked to third-party providers and software issues. 

The report stressed that, as consumer reliance on digital payments grows, the effective management of these systems becomes even more critical.

The RBA says it is monitoring system reliability closely and pushing for improved infrastructure and operational responses.

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