St George Bank is among three institutions hit in the outage. Picture: PicMark/Calleja

Major outage hits three Aussie banks


St George bank customers have been left unable to access their money after an outage in the company's mobile and internet banking services, two days after a similar outage.

BankSA and Bank of Melbourne, which are part of Sydney based St George, have also been affected.

The three banks have sent out almost identical messages on social media.

As of 1pm the services remained down as the bank worked to fix the issue, but it said St. George ATMs, EFTPOS and credit cards aren't affected.

The bank first announced shortly before 9am that services were down.

An hour and a half later things still weren't fixed.

"We are still working to restore our internet and mobile banking service as soon as we can," the update at 10.30am said.

Westpac, which owns all three banks, doesn't appear to be experiencing similar issues.

St. George customers were particularly annoyed that the outage came so quickly after a similar issue over the weekend took down some services for more than five hours.


"Absolute joke. This shouldn't happen," said one Bank SA customer. Another said she would change banks due to the ongoing IT woes.

A St George customer said the tech problems were "ridiculous".

"Thanks for the reminder to close my accounts and shift all my banking."

It's not clear yet whether today's outage has been caused by the same issue.

The outage comes less than a fortnight after the Commonwealth Bank was hit with a long-running outage that left many cut off from their cash.

The outage delayed payments for some customers and the bank deposited $50 into some accounts as an apology.

Following the outage Commonwealth Bank confirmed it was the result of "infrastructure upgrade" that crippled the bank's real time transactions platform.

St. George is yet to provide a reason for its ongoing outage.

In 2015, the company suffered an outage that lasted more than 24 hours after a mainframe computer system was corrupted during an update.