The Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) said that its mobile app and online banking services are working again as of Tuesday, June 16, ending a widespread outage that locked customers out for close to two days and ran straight through payday.
BPI first flagged the problem in an advisory on the night of June 14, telling customers that the BPI app, BPI Online, the use of BPI login credentials on third-party apps, and BPI debit and credit card payments for e-commerce were all unavailable. The bank posted five updates over the following days while its technical team worked on a fix.
The bank blamed the disruption on network problems. “We regret the disruption caused by unexpected network connectivity issues that affected our systems,” BPI said in its restoration update. It also warned that customers may still see slower response times for a while as traffic returns to normal levels.
Not everything went dark during the outage. BPI said ATM withdrawals, over-the-counter branch transactions, and debit card purchases at stores kept working, and that salary deposits were not affected. “Payroll credits have been processed as scheduled,” the bank said on June 15, after the downtime overlapped with that day’s payday and left many employees worried about their take-home pay.
The timing drew heavy reactions online. Several customers called on the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas, the country’s central bank, to penalize BPI over the inconvenience. One person who identified as a former BPI employee and another who described himself as a tech solution architect argued on X that the downtime had gone past the service-level targets regulators expect banks to meet. A self-identified lawyer and certified public accountant, Nico Valderrama, posted that a banking app should not fail during payday, when banks are expected to keep services running. Columnist Noemi Dado wrote that advisories were no longer enough and said affected customers were owed an inconvenience credit. The hashtag #BPIDown spread as users described missed payments and money they could not move.
For context on the scale, BPI is the oldest bank in the Philippines and in Southeast Asia, with 173 years of operations and about 15.98 million customers as of December 2024. A digital outage of this length at a bank that size meant a large number of Filipinos had no online access to their accounts during one of the busiest cash periods of the month.
BPI said it is taking steps to strengthen its systems and asked customers for patience while performance stabilizes. As of its restoration announcement, the bank had not released a detailed account of what triggered the network failure, nor said whether affected customers would receive any compensation.
