Customers of Capitec Bank South Africa were unable to access any of the bank’s digital services from the early hours of Thursday last week until around Saturday morning when the bank announced that its services had been restored. The digital services included the mobile app, internet banking, and USSD services.
With more than 7.5 million active users, Capitec Bank’s online banking app is among the most used in South Africa, making it one of the biggest and most well-liked financial services providers in the nation.
However, the bank reports that all of Capitec’s digital channels are now operational, and all postponed payments owing to the outage have been handled. According to Capitec, all banking fees incurred as a result of the outage will be reimbursed.
Customers responded negatively to the outages in a big way, especially on social media. After its digital services were restored, Capitec apologized, regretting that it wasn’t “the level of service we aim to give” and vowing to improve moving forward.
“We know we’ve let our clients down and we sincerely apologize,” said Capitec spokesperson Francois Viviers while speaking about the cause of the outage.
What Caused Capitec Bank’s Outage?
The system-wide network outage, according to Capitec, was caused by a sizable internal infrastructure problem which the bank claimed it had never seen before. Its central servers were apparently affected by the problem.
“We have never experienced an issue of this magnitude and will continue to do our best to ensure that this does not happen again. We have system upgrades and tests in place to support this,” Viviers said.
Viviers further explained that Capitec paused all of its digital services for about 40 hours to “ensure a sustainable recovery after one of [its] banking system databases slowed down sporadically”.
Even though its customers were unable to access the banking app, USSD, or internet banking, Capitec claims that its staff gave top priority to ensure that customers could still access their money through ATMs and point-of-sale.
In 2021, Capitec encountered a similar outage as users complained that they couldn’t access the mobile banking app. However, this disruption was significantly brief, unlike this one, and operations resumed quite fast.
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