Canadian banks hit with computer glitches

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July 29, 2004 (ITWorldCanada) -- The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and TD Bank Financial Group were both hit with unidentified computer glitches, according to news reports this morning, causing disruption to some customer accounts and online banking.
About 60,000 personal line-of-credit accounts at the CIBC were affected by a system error early today that caused a double-dipping effect to take place on customer accounts and as well as some problems with online banking systems.
All computer systems responsible for processing customer transactions are now operating normally, according to a statement by CIBC today, and the bank is working to reverse a number of erroneous transactions that occurred for some customers with personal lines of credit.
The glitch caused bank withdrawals, deposits, money transfers and debit payments to replicate in some of the line-of-credit accounts at the CIBC. So, for example, if a customer took out $20 from his account, it would appear twice on the transaction record, totaling $40.
Toronto-based CIBC has more than 9 million retail banking customers in Canada. Less than 1% of them were affected by this error, CIBC said.
The bank said that it intends to reverse the incorrect transactions as quickly as possible and that it would ensure that affected customers don't experience any difficulties due to insufficient funds or other charges that might occur as a result of the error. Any such charges would be reversed.
Explanations or details of the system errors were unavailable. A spokesperson for CIBC didn't return phone calls to IT World Canada before deadline.
In related news, TD Bank Financial Group also had some technical difficulties on Wednesday night around 6 p.m., experiencing what it called "a temporary system malfunction."
"We are up and running, and everything is fine," said Christa Poole, a company spokeswoman. "The money was always safe and secure."
The specifics of the "technical problem" still aren't known by the bank, but Poole said it's investigating what caused its online system, called EasyWeb, to be unavailable for several hours last night.
"Customers who logged onto the site got a message saying the service wasn't available," Poole said. "Customers' accounts were not affected."
Downtime on account access was also reported at ATMs, Poole said. Customers who inserted their banking cards into ATMs got an error message saying the machines were temporarily out of service.
Everything is back to normal today, she added.
Earlier this summer, the Royal Bank of Canada had a public relations nightmare when it announced what it called a "processing glitch," which was discovered during a routine programming update to one of its computer systems (see story).
As a result of the problem, many client transactions, including deposits, withdrawals and payments made on May 31 and June 1, weren't reflected in clients' account balances. The error was eventually ironed out, but several delays hampered the repair effort.
A delay in payroll was another effect of Toronto-based RBC's computing problems. For example, approximately 62,000 full-time employees of the province of Ontario were affected by RBC's processing glitch.

Reprinted with permission from

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