The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and TD Bank
Financial Group have been hit with unidentified computer glitches,
causing disruption to some customer accounts and online
banking.
About 60,000 accounts at the CIBC were affected by a system
error that caused a double-dipping effect to take place on accounts
and also caused some problems with online banking systems.
All computer systems responsible for processing customer
transactions are now operating normally, according to CIBC, and the
bank is working to reverse a number of erroneous transactions that
occurred for some customers with personal lines of credit.
Bank withdrawals, deposits, money transfers and debit payments
were being doubled in some of the line of credit accounts at the
CIBC.
The bank has more than nine million retail banking customers in
Canada but fewer than 1% were affected by this error, CIBC
said.
The bank said it intends to reverse the incorrect transactions
as quickly as possible and it would ensure that affected customers
do not experience any difficulties as a result of the error. Any
such charges would be reversed.
Explanations or details of the system errors were not
available.
TD Bank Financial Group also had some technical difficulties,
experiencing what it called "a temporary system malfunction".
"We are up and running and everything is fine," said Christa
Poole, a spokesperson for TD Bank Financial Group. "The money was
always safe and secure."
The specifics of the "technical problem" is still not known by
the bank, but Poole said it is investigating what caused its online
system, called EasyWeb, to be unavailable for several hours.
"Customers who logged onto the site got a message saying the
service was not available," Poole said. "Customers accounts were
not affected."
Downtime on account access was also happening at cash machines,
Poole said. Customers who inserted their banking cards into cash
machines got an error message explaining that the machines were
temporarily out of service.
Everything is now back to normal, she added.
Earlier this summer, the Royal Bank of Canada had a public
relations nightmare when it announced what it called a "processing
glitch", discovered during a routine programming update to one of
its computer systems.
The problem resulted in many client transactions - including
deposits, withdrawals and payments made over two days - not being
reflected in clients' account balances. The error was eventually
ironed out, however several delays hampered the repair effort.
A delay in payroll was another effect of RBC computing issues.
Approximately 62,000 employees of the Province of Ontario, for
example, were affected by RBC's processing glitch.
Allison Taylor writes for ITWorld