Banco CTT Switches Off Its App, Homebanking and MB WAY Transfers Until Monday for a Systems Update, but Cards and Cash Withdrawals Still Work

Customers of Banco CTT, the bank that operates through Portugal's post office brand, are without the bank's app and homebanking this weekend while it carries out what it calls a scheduled technology update of its systems. In a notice on its own website, the bank says the work runs from 16 to 18 October and that the affected services will be restored on Monday 19 October.

The bank's notice does not give an hour for the start or the end of the outage. The digital services went down at 15:00 on Friday, according to Jornal de Negócios, which also reported that customers had only a day's warning. Banco CTT describes itself as having more than 800,000 customers and 212 shops in every district of Portugal.

What does not work until Monday

The bank lists four services as unavailable or limited during the update:

The Banco CTT app and homebanking are both offline. MB WAY transfers cannot be sent or received. Incoming instant transfers cannot be received. Balance and statement enquiries at Multibanco cash machines are also switched off, so customers cannot check how much money they have at an ATM until the update is finished.

Jornal de Negócios also reported that scheduled transfers would not be carried out during the outage. The bank's own notice does not mention scheduled transfers, so anyone with a standing order or rent payment due over the weekend may want to confirm with the bank on Monday that it went through.

What still works

The bank says every other service stays available. Cards can still be used to pay in shops and online, in Portugal and abroad, including by contactless, MB WAY card payments and digital wallets (Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Google Pay). Cash withdrawals work at any Multibanco machine, at ATMs outside the SIBS network and abroad, with the usual daily limit of 400 euros. Ordinary (non-instant) transfers and transfers made at a Multibanco machine still go through, as do payments for services and purchases, payments to the State and phone top-ups at Multibanco.

Anyone expecting money between 16 and 18 October should ask the sender to use an ordinary transfer rather than an instant one, the bank advises; those are processed within the usual times. Because balance checks are off, it is worth keeping track of spending until Monday, particularly with the 400 euro withdrawal ceiling in place. Once services return, the usual rules apply, including the requirement that banks check the payee's name on transfers.

Watch for fraud while the systems change

The bank stresses that once the update is complete, customers will not need to update their personal details, change passwords, hand over login credentials or reactivate their accounts. A message asking for any of these should be treated as suspicious. Banco CTT says it never asks for authentication codes, credentials or card details by phone, text message or email, and that homebanking only ever asks for three characters of a password, so a page that asks for the whole password is fake.

The bank asks customers to read the update notice only by typing www.bancoctt.pt into the browser, not through links, and to report anything suspicious to its support line, 212 697 144. Similar tricks appear in the fake bank card letters the Bank of Portugal warned about this month, which push urgent "activation" in the same way.