As you and no doubt your clients may have noticed, currency exchange provider Travelex’s online operations have been out of action for the past two weeks.
It turns out the software virus that caused the outage is ransomware known as Sodinokibi (REvil) which is now holding Travelex to ransom to the tune of US$6 million ($8.7 million).
On Wednesday morning, Travelex’s Australian Twitter account released two statements confirming it would “now start restoring customer-facing systems” beginning with those which enable “the company to process customers’ order electronically within its partners’ and its own retail branch networks”.
“The majority of the Travelex business has been operating and servicing customers around the world,” one of the statements said.
https://twitter.com/Travelex_AUS/status/1217288977067069440
Despite this, its Australian website is still displaying a message apologising that its online travel money service is not available right now.
The company said it took all systems offline to “prevent the spread of the virus across the network”.
“Whilst the investigation is still ongoing, to date our investigation shows that customer data has not been compromised,” it said.
“We have now contained the virus and are working to restore our systems and resume normal operations as quickly as possible.”
Its also being reported that some stores have been manually processing customer requests using pen and paper.
But it’s not only travellers who are suffering, Which-50 reported that a number of Aussie banks have also been hit by the outage.
The shutdown means banks that rely on Travelex to offer cash in foreign currencies have not been able to take orders from customers.
Westpac, Bendigo and Adelaide bank all confirmed to Which-50 that they had been impacted by the company going offline.
Those affected by the outage should go here for more details.
Featured image: (iStock.com/baona)
