Crédit Mutuel hit by outage that prevented customers from paying or withdrawing money

A breakdown affected Crédit Mutuel's IT services, preventing the banking group's customers from paying or withdrawing money for two hours on Saturday, August 30. "An internal malfunction prevented bank card payments and withdrawals by members and customers of 16 Crédit Mutuel federations between 5:20 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.," Crédit Mutuel announced on the social network X on Saturday.

"The internal cause of the incident was quickly identified and resolved thanks to the mobilization of our IT teams," continues the bank, which offers its "sincere apologies to the members, customers and traders affected."

A spokesperson for the group told Agence France-Presse that it was a bug in the acceptance of payments from Crédit Mutuel, CIC, and Monabanq cardholders, a bug that "is not unprecedented" in the banking world, even though it was the first time it had affected the group's 14 million customers. He could not yet specify exactly how many customers had been affected.

On social media, many customers complained about being unable to pay for their purchases two days before the start of the school year. According to the website Downdetector, which tracks communication outages on online platforms, more than 5,200 reports had been made about the Crédit Mutuel outage and nearly 3,000 for CIC, as of Saturday around 8:30 p.m.