On Friday evening, Discovery Bank clients were hit by a glitch which showed that their available bank balances were wiped out to R0.00, leaving them unable to make payments.
Netwerk24 reported that one client was left stranded at a petrol station because his card didn't work when he wanted to pay for fuel.
When he tried to withdraw money from an ATM, his card balance was displayed as R0.00. The bank app showed the same balance.
Discovery Bank clients also complained on Twitter:
Discovery Bank spokesperson Felicity Hudson confirmed the problem to Fin24.
"Discovery Bank experienced downtime on Friday evening which lasted approximately an hour. This affected a limited number of our clients," said Hudson.
Hudson said during that period some payments at petrol stations were impacted. The Discovery's banking app also showed incorrect information for a small number of users.
Hudson did not give specific numbers on the number of clients affected.
"While all banks experience such outages from time to time, we aim to do better and hence, we apologise unreservedly to all our clients for any inconvenience that they may have experienced," Hudson said.
She said Discovery Bank would continue working to iron out the glitches and assist any clients that may have been affected by the downtime.
Discovery [JSE:DSY], a healthcare solutions giant, made its foray into the world of banking last year, after successfully obtaining a banking licence.