Capitec online banking outage

Capitec’s web-based online banking service is suffering downtime, the bank has confirmed to customers.

Outage tracking service Downdetector shows that Capitec saw an increase in complaints from around 15:00, with downtime reports surging from around 16:00.

“Capitec, your web app has been down for over an hour — and it took that long just to get confirmation via WhatsApp, your ‘fastest’ support option. It’s month-end. What’s going on?” asked Twitter/X user Jon Stamatelos.

“We’re experiencing downtime on our online banking services, and we sincerely apologise for any inconvenience caused,” Capitec responded.

“In the meantime, you can continue using our app. Our team is working to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. We appreciate your patience.”

MyBroadband contacted Capitec for feedback about the outage, and it said that although its web-based banking services were offline, other channels remain unaffected.

“Capitec is currently experiencing technical difficulties with online banking. Our team is working hard to restore full access to the web service,” the bank said.

“In the meantime, we encourage clients to use the Capitec banking app or USSD for their transactions. We apologise for the inconvenience and will notify our clients as soon as the issue is resolved.”

Capitec last experienced a significant nationwide outage in July last year as the result of a global problem caused by cybersecurity platform provider Crowdstrike.

Crowdstrike initially said a “content deployment” was responsible for sending Windows computers worldwide into a dreaded Blue Screen of Death boot loop.

Windows users around the world reported receiving a blue screen error message pointing to a Crowdstrike system agent causing the problem.

Crowdstrike later confirmed the issue and provided a workaround for system administrators to recover impacted systems.

However, the workaround required technicians to have physical access to machines and fix each one individually.

After several hours of downtime, Capitec announced that its banking services had been fully restored.

Capitec assured customers at the time that their bank accounts and personal details were secure and unaffected by the incident.

In addition to Capitec, the issues impacted airports, television news stations, other financial institutions, emergency services, and various other industries and companies globally.

Sky News in the UK, ABC in Australia, and the London Stock Exchange all experienced problems or outages as a result of the issue.

Reports of the widespread blue screen issues came shortly after Microsoft fixed a cloud services outage that impacted flight operations in the US the day before.