GTBank Customers Lament Monday Service Shutdown
The customers of GTBank have expressed displeasure over the service downtime that the bank experienced on Monday. The bank which has a large customer base went out of service for the entire day without prior notice to its customers.
Neusroom gathered that the disruption was caused by a system failure that logged all the users out of their accounts. All digital channels of the bank from the mobile app, USSD, ATM, POS were inaccessible and transactions carried out within the downtime were debited without corresponding recipient credit.
One frustrated customer did not take the issue lightly as he accused the bank of scam and threatened to close his account.
“Return my money this time and I will walk into a branch to shut down my account in person. I can’t be dealing with Nigerian hunger and still be dealing with Nigerian Scammer Bank,” he tweeted.
“Pls [sic] I’ll like to know if your system downtime is also taking funds from my accounts. I’m impatient now. And I need answers asap. @gtbank [is] no more number one on my list. You can’t keep your money and sleep well! Rubbish,” another one tweeted.
“I am closing my account with this stupid bank,” a lady who said she has been experiencing service disruption for 3 days tweeted.
The incident created panic among some customers who had important deadlines but were unable to access their bank accounts. Some people believed that the bank had been hacked, but the issue was reportedly due to a temporary downtime that it was working to rectify.
As a result of the service shutdown, the bank was forced to extend banking hours to 6pm across its branches to accommodate customers who were trooping in to make transactions offline.
Responding to the issue, GTBank took to Twitter to acknowledge the disruption and apologized to the affected customers.
“Dear Customer, we know you have experienced some inconvenience today using our banking channels. We sincerely apologize for the disruption in our service delivery to you and we are extending banking hours at our branches till 6pm today.” — @gtbank.
It further assured its customers that the service will be restored as soon as possible.
When the service was eventually restored, some customers demanded a sort of compensation like MTN did when they had a downtime last week.
“MTN network was down for a few days after they fixed it they gave us 100mb each as an apology. I don’t need to tell you what to do, do I?” — one Twitter user demanded.
Many Nigerian banks go through routine downtime from time to time. Although GTBank has always been upheld as one of the best banks in the country, it also experiences system failure like all others.
