Hundreds of Kiwibank customers double-charged after system failure

Kiwibank has had a slew of issues in the past weeks. Photo / Supplied

Hundreds of people were double-charged on Friday after a system failure impacted the connection between Kiwibank and Visa Debit Cards.

Between 3.20pm and 3.35pm on Friday, 230 Kiwibank customers were charged twice for their purchases, with a total value of "less than $10,000" according to communications manager Kara Tait.

These customers are now being refunded.

"We are in the process of refunding any double-ups. There is no action required by customers who should see a credit in their account over the next day or so."

Tait said Kiwibank had proactively refunded the money to customers after a small number of people alerted them to the issue.

It's the latest blow for the bank after weeks of issues with its app and phone banking services.

In early September the bank's internet banking, app, website and phone services crashed, leaving customers unable to access their accounts.

The phone line was swamped, leading to longer than usual wait times. The first outage coincided with a cyber security attack which took out a number of major organisations' websites.

All came back online around midday that day, but CERT NZ posted a statement saying it was aware of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) targeting a number of New Zealand organisations.

Kiwibank did not confirm its outages were the result of this attack.

It was the first of several outages, with the most recent occurring two weeks ago.