Commonwealth Bank Users Hit with Duplicate Transactions and Overdrawn Accounts

Commonwealth Bank Australia (CBA) customers are furious after a wide spread error caused duplicate transactions to be taken from their accounts, leaving many facing financial hardship and overdrawn balances. The issue, which emerged earlier this morning, has triggered a wave of frustration across social media.

At 9:52 am AEDT, the bank took to social platform X to acknowledge the problem, saying, “We are aware some customers are seeing duplicate transactions from payments.” The bank assured customers that they are working to reverse these transactions “as a matter of urgency” and promised that any fees resulting from the error would be refunded.

This post has now gathered hundreds of replies from frustrated customers, many of whom report being unable to buy groceries, commute to work, or attend medical appointments due to their overdrawn accounts and one person tweeted they had the police called on them for being unable to pay for fuel. Some also mention being on hold with the bank for hours and unable to access the message service in the Commbank App.

When I personally encountered this issue at 7 am and contacted the bank to report duplicate transactions on my account, the chat support agent failed to mention that it was a known system outage and offered to cancel my bank card.

The Commonwealth Bank social team are just telling people they can monitor the incident at this link but providing no ETA on the return of funds to customers.

This isn’t the first time Commonwealth Bank has faced such an issue. A similar problem occurred in 2022, raising questions about the reliability of its payment processing systems. Today, affected customers have expressed their distress online, with some saying the duplicate transactions have left them in financial hardship. Many are now waiting for answers on when their funds will be returned.

“We’re sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for being patient with us,” the bank added in their statement, though for many customers, the damage has already been done and four hours into it with no updates people are rightly demanding answers.

This all comes on the back of massive outages by Westpac over the past week, seeing many of there customers unable to accept online payments or access their money via ATM and online banking with four major outages.

As CBA works to resolve the issue, customers are advised to monitor their accounts and contact the bank if they need assistance.