Banks and other financial institutions all over the world have seen their fair share of computer glitches and errors. Bank of the Philippine Islands suffered from a recent glitch which could have had severe repercussions if not solved quickly. It turns out some users were complaining about how their bank accounts were suddenly missing a fair amount of money. This is never a positive development for any bank whatsoever.
Filipino Bank Suffers From Major Software Glitch
Having customers complain about money in their bank accounts gone missing is a PR nightmare for any financial institution. News like this immediately creates a lot of speculation, which only makes the situation worse. For the Bank of the Philippine Islands, this nightmare scenario became very real two days ago. With multiple customers missing funds in their accounts, it quickly became evident an investigation had to be conducted to rectify this situation as quickly as possible.
Things only got worse when the bank was forced to suspend ATM withdrawals and online transactions a few hours later. Some people started spreading rumors about the bank being hacked, although it does not appear that was ever the case. However, not allowing customers to withdraw their own money from bank ATMs or complete online transactions only fuels these rumors even further, rather than address the problem at hand.
It didn’t take long until a lot of bank customers publicly voiced their concern on social media. More complaints started coming in about missing money, and the rest of the customers were unable to access their funds. It turns out the bank was hit by a major software glitch, which caused user balances to display an incorrect amount. While such situations are still problematic, it is much better than having to deal with a potential hack.
More specifically, the Bank of Philippine Islands acknowledged their IT system caused a few issues. Some transactions were double-posted between April 27 and May 2. As a result, some users saw their account balances adjusted to make sure there were no discrepancies. This is a rather troublesome development for any bank’s IT infrastructure, but it looks like the institution is addressing the situation as we speak. The IT system has been kept offline for the remainder of last night and this morning, as engineers are working hard on manually restoring affected user accounts.
It is expected online transactions and bank ATM withdrawals will be resumed later this day, which is good news. For now, it remains unclear what caused the transition double-posting in the first place. It is evident the engineers have to go through the entire IT system to see what caused the problem and ensure it can never happen again. Not allowing customers to access their own funds is never the right course of action by any means.
Situations like these are a bank manager’s nightmare scenario come true. Technical glitches can affect any company at any given time, that much is evident. However, when things like these occur, all hell breaks loose pretty quickly. It will take some time until Bank of the Philippine Islands will regain customer trust after this PR nightmare. Thankfully, the bank was not hacked, which will put a lot of people’s minds at ease.
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