Five major Canadian banks went offline for hours blocking access to online and mobile banking as well as e-transfers for customers.
The banks reportedly hit by the outage include Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), BMO (Bank of Montreal), Scotiabank, and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC), according to reports from Bleeping Computer and others. Users began reporting issues with banks around 1600-1700 ET, Downdector data showed.
Online banking suffers
Canada’s five major banks went offline yesterday impeding access to e-Transfers, online and mobile banking services for many. Reports of users having trouble getting to their online banking peaked between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.
“We are currently experiencing technical issues with our online and mobile banking, as well as our phone systems,” an RBC representative confirmed. “Our experts are investigating and working to get this fixed as quickly as possible, but we have no ETA to provide at this time. We appreciate your patience.”
BMO customers also saw the bank’s ‘Global Money Transfer service’ being down all day with transfers getting auto-rejected for no obvious reason. A BMO representative directed such customers to reach out to the customer service. One customer said, “I’m having trouble and money transfer just auto gets rejected for no reason. Not going over my limit, all info is verified correct and receiving bank says no issues on their end.”
CIBC didn’t acknowledge any issues with their online banking. TD Bank’s mobile banking app reportedly locked users out, with customer service representatives responding that they haven’t been advised of recent issues with our online service through EasyWeb.
A TD Bank spokesperson told BleepingComputer that TD Bank did not experience any widespread system outage or issue. The cause of the outage is yet to be known but its timing is rather interesting, just days after the Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act amid ongoing ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests.
