For thousands of Scotiabank customers, the past few days have been a maddening loop of error messages and frozen accounts. A widespread outage, sparked by a third-party vendor’s technical fumble, has crippled access to online and mobile banking since late April, leaving people unable to pay bills, transfer cash, or even check their balances. As of May 3, 2025, the bank is still scrambling to restore full service, and customers are fuming.
The trouble kicked off on April 30, when Scotiabank’s digital platforms started buckling. Customers logging into the app or website were met with blank screens or cryptic error codes. By May 1, the bank confirmed the issue stemmed from a third-party vendor—a key cog in their digital infrastructure gone haywire. Scotiabank’s official statement on May 2 acknowledged “intermittent issues” with banking services and promised a fix was in the works. But for many, that fix hasn’t come fast enough.
The outage couldn’t have hit at a worse time. With rent, mortgages, and bills due at the start of May, customers found themselves locked out of their own money. Small business owners, reliant on quick transfers to pay suppliers, were left twisting. Scotiabank, one of Canada’s Big Five banks, serves millions, and the ripple effects of this glitch have been brutal. The bank’s call centers, flooded with complaints, have struggled to keep up, with some customers reporting hours on hold.
On May 3, Scotiabank issued another update, admitting that while “significant progress” had been made, some users were still locked out. They’ve pledged to reimburse any fees—like overdraft or late payment charges—tied to the outage. But that’s cold comfort for those who’ve missed payments or scrambled to borrow cash. The bank hasn’t named the vendor behind the mess or given a firm timeline for full recovery, leaving customers in the dark.
This isn’t Scotiabank’s first tech stumble. In November 2024, a week-long outage sparked by a software update gone wrong drew heavy criticism. The Canadian Bankers Association, in a May 2 statement, noted that while banking outages are rare, third-party dependencies are a growing risk across the industry. Scotiabank’s latest headache underscores how fragile even a banking giant’s systems can be when a single link in the chain snaps.
As the bank works to untangle the mess, customers are left waiting. Some have taken to visiting branches, only to find in-person services hampered by the same backend issues. Others are stuck, unable to move money or manage accounts, as May’s bills pile up. Scotiabank’s promise of refunds and apologies hasn’t quelled the frustration for those caught in the outage’s grip.