ME Bank app and internet banking restored after near 29-hour outage

Members Equity Bank (ME Bank) has restored its app and Internet banking services after a near 29-hour outage blamed on an unspecified “technical issue”.

The bank said in a status update at midnight that "specialist teams" had managed to get services working. It had earlier pledged to work through the night in a bid to recover services.

"Transactions and account balances will update progressively over the coming hours," it said.

"Credit card balances may take longer than usual to reflect recent transactions.

"We’ll continue to keep you updated as all outstanding transactions are processed."

The root cause of the outage has not been confirmed.

ME Bank’s owner, Bank of Queensland (BOQ), would not confirm whether the outage was triggered by ongoing integration of ME Bank with BOQ's systems, a scheduled update or other cause.

There were no “upcoming system updates” listed on its webpage to warn customers of scheduled maintenance that could cause “potential disruptions to services.”

ME Bank’s banking system status webpage first reported that its app and internet banking services were offline at 7:15 pm on Wednesday.

An update posted at 6:00pm yesterday said that “scheduled payments in and out of ME accounts are now being processed".

The outage did not impact BOQ’s apps or internet services, which remained operational, according to BOQ’s customer-facing applications’ availability updates webpage.

Migrating ME Bank’s customers to BOQ

Since acquiring more than 170,000 ME Bank customers in 2021, BOQ has worked to migrate all of its systems to public cloud and all of its customers to a new core banking platform, which houses the Virgin Money Australia (VMA) brand as well as new BOQ Retail bank customers.

BoQ launched the ME Go app on the cloud-based, core banking platform in July last year and said its acquired ME Bank customers would be migrated across to the new app “at a later stage”.

In April last year, BOQ reported that it was in the final stages of its ME Bank integration and that the project’s costs had brought its statutory net profit after tax down 98 percent to $4 million.