ORIGINAL STORY (3 Sept 2020 // 11:49 AM): There seems to be no end in sight for the technical issues affecting CIMB’s Online Banking platform CIMB Clicks. The intermittent connectivity issue which we believe is related to capacity problems that manifested on Tuesday the 1st of September was initially supposed to be rectified by 2 PM on the very same day. However, this window was later extended to 8 PM and then extended again to 4 AM the next day. While the system was briefly available in the early hours of Wednesday, connectivity became sporadic as more customers started accessing the system to sort out their monthly banking activities. This morning, the web system was once again taken offline with a message directing users to the mobile app. At the time of writing, the CIMB Clicks mobile app is still accessible, but transactions are still painfully slow. As expected, CIMB Clicks’ social media channels have been flooded with complaints from frustrated customers who are not able to get any transactions done.
The CIMB Clicks online banking service is no stranger to outages, especially at the end of the month when there is a spike in the number of concurrent users accessing their online banking accounts to sort out their monthly commitments. UPDATE (4 Sept 2020 // 6:45 PM): As a response to our report, CIMB earlier today has sent a statement which we have reproduced in full below: While the reason provided by CIMB is rather straight forward, the bank should have come forward and explained it to their customers in a much wider manner. Till now, we have not seen such notice on the bank’s social media channels despite the fact that CIMB customers would likely face intermittent disruption until this weekend. This was due to the complexities faced during a planned system upgrade and modernisation to infrastructure to improve the stability and overall customer experience. Throughout this period, customers were still able to perform their transactions on our mobile app. We urge customers who have not downloaded the CIMB Clicks Mobile App to do so. The planned upgrade will continue over the weekend, from 12 midnight Friday 4 September until 12 noon Saturday 5 September as well as 11 pm Saturday 5 September until 8 am Sunday 6 September. The upgrade will affect both CIMB Clicks via web browsers and the app. Should customers need further clarification, they can contact our Consumer Call Centre at 03-6204 7788. We would like to thank our customers for their kind understanding and patience.
Additionally, the bank should also list down the upgrade timeline directly into the pop-up service notification on CIMB Clicks website, instead of having it buried inside the Announcements section of the site. Truth to be told, CIMB Clicks has been facing outage so often for the past few months that some users may have deemed service disruptions as a new norm for the online banking platform. Stability is supposed to be one of the key foundations for a financial institution. But unfortunately, that is not something you can say about CIMB Clicks at this moment.
