Some Scotiabank customers still unable to access accounts after 'scheduled maintenance'

Last Friday, Scotiabank's customer service account on X stated that there would be scheduled maintenance starting that day and ending on Tuesday, affecting several credit card and line of credit services. 

But that quickly turned into an outage for many customers, and they flocked to social media to report that they were unable to even view their accounts online or send e-Transfers. 

And, a day after maintenance was supposed to have been completed, customers were still experiencing outages. 

The bank acknowledged in a statement on X on Wednesday afternoon that "some clients are experiencing intermittent access to some banking services."

"Scotiabank is working diligently to restore all functionality as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience this has caused our clients."

The outage, which comes after Scotiabank suffered a technical issue this summer that disrupted the deposit of customers' paycheques, has resulted in a slew of angry comments online, as well as a proposed class action lawsuit. 

Scotiabank did not directly answer CBC's questions on whether it was aware of more services being down than it had previously stated would be impacted. In a statement, it said point-of-sale transactions had not been affected.

Yusuf Mahamed, a Scotiabank customer based in North Vancouver, B.C., said that he first noticed the issue Tuesday morning, when he tried to access his online banking and found he couldn't send an e-Transfer to his wife.

"My entire online banking suite was not working," he told CBC News. It still hadn't been fixed as of Wednesday evening. "It doesn't show my credit card at all."

He said he hadn't received any communication from Scotiabank beforehand letting him know about the maintenance.

Downdetector, a third-party outage tracker, found that more than 1,500 people were reporting an outage at the peak on Wednesday morning, compared to the usual baseline of six reports. 

Scotiabank's initial tweet on Nov. 8 linked to a post on its website, which warned that access to some services would be unavailable from Nov. 8 to 12, including requesting a supplementary card or a credit limit increase, and setting up or cancelling auto payments. They would be unavailable across "all channels," the post stated — meaning online, on the Scotiabank app, over the phone or in person. 

But the issues reported by customers ranged beyond those outlined. While effects were temporary for some, according to comments on Scotiabank's X account, others are still unable to access their funds.  

The central complainant of a proposed class action lawsuit filed Wednesday morning was shocked when she was unable to log into her Scotiabank business account on Nov. 12, according to attorney Joey Zurkan, of Montreal-based law firm LPC Avocats.