Bank of the Philippine Islands is extending branch opening hours and suspending all electronic channels after an internal processing error resulted in the double posting of transactions across customer accounts over a five-day period.
The nation's oldest bank has been fending off a Twitter storm among panicking customers who have seen funds disappear from accounts as a result of the double debiting error, sparking fears that BPI was under attack from hackers.
In a media advisory, the bank pointed to an unspecified "internal data processing error" as the cause of the snafu, rather than penetration of its systems by nefarious sources.
The bank says it expects full resolution by the end of the day, although nine hours into the crisis it was still battling to rectify the problem.