Westpac has confirmed it has restored its mobile and online banking services this morning after a more than eight-hour unscheduled systems downtime overnight.

The bank said it had restored services at around 5 am on Tuesday morning, with the crash appearing to have occurred sometime after 8 pm on Monday.

Westpac blamed the outage on a “routine technology update”, conducted at around 9 pm on Monday, which left customers unable to view or access their online Westpac accounts.

Posting on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, at 9:19 pm on Monday (with a follow-up update issued at 11:48 pm), Westpac said it was “aware that customers currently experiencing issues accessing account information” in its online and mobile banking services.

The bank added that its teams were “working to fix the issue”, but did not provide further details.

Multiple customers took to social media to air their concerns, noting they were cut off from several retail banking services, including the ability to access their accounts, pay bills, or make contactless payments on their phones.

Customers also reported that their accounts and cards appeared to have entirely disappeared from Westpac apps.

Payments via cards and digital wallets were reportedly unaffected, while ATMs and scheduled payments also continued to operate “as usual”, the bank said.

Westpac’s systems crash had echoes of last month’s Optus network outage, which saw the telco’s services taken offline for around 14 hours.

The Optus outage affected around 10 million people and caused significant disruptions to retail customers, government agencies, including hospitals and train services, and private sector entities, including EFTPOS terminals.

Westpac invited customers with specific concerns resulting from the outage to contact the bank for assistance.