Vancity says online banking restored, no word yet on cause of crash

Vancity credit union says it has resolved a technical issue that caused its online banking system to crash for three days.

The issue, which began around midnight on Wednesday, caused an outrage on the cred union’s online platform, app, IT and some core banking services.

ATMs, credit cards and point of sales debit payments were not affected.

Around 3:15 p.m. Saturday, the institution released a statement saying it had fixed the problem and was bringing the system back online.

Get daily National news

Get daily Canada news delivered to your inbox so you'll never miss the day's top stories.

Sign up for daily National newsletter Get Started

By providing your email address, you have read and agree to Global News' Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

“Given the size and complexity of the system, we will need to do this process gradually throughout the afternoon,” read the statement.

“To make this go as smoothly as possible, we’d ask those without a need to make urgent transactions to wait a bit before using online banking.”

However, as of Saturday afternoon, there was still no word on the cause of the crash.

Vancity said while the system is restored, some customers may notice that recent transactions have not yet been updated online.

Earlier on Saturday, Vancity CEO Tamara Vrooman posted a video to the company’s website apologizing for the issue.

“Clearly, three days of system outage is not what we would expect, it’s not what you would expect and it’s not good enough. I apologize for the inconvenience,” she said.

Share this on X Click to share quote on X: "Clearly, three days of system outage is not what we would expect, it's not what you would expect and it's not good enough. I apologize for the inconvenience," she said.

She said the credit union is promising to make things right and to cover any penalties or service charges that clients incur due to the outage.

Vancity had extended branch hours and staffed call centres and social media teams during the outage in a bid to keep up with customers questions and complaints.

On Friday, Vancity said that it had ruled out a hack or data breach as the cause of the outage. It’s still not clear what caused the crash.