Bank Hapoalim's Bit App Faces New Outage, Users Unable to Transfer Funds

Bank Hapoalim's popular payment app, Bit, experienced a technical malfunction on Tuesday morning, preventing users from transferring money. Users attempting to use the app encountered an error message stating "Data not loaded, please try again," with all subsequent attempts failing. Bit is Israel's leading app for peer-to-peer cash transfers and payments, serving 3.5 million active users and handling an average monthly transfer volume of 2.45 billion shekels last year.

Despite its dominance, Bit has gradually lost market share to Discount Bank's competing app, PayBox, which gained popularity by initially not charging fees but limiting monthly transfer amounts unless users obtained a dedicated credit card. Bank Hapoalim acknowledged the issue, stating that their teams are working to resolve the problem promptly and apologized for the inconvenience.

Operating under Bank Hapoalim's Financial Markets Division, Bit incurs high operational costs because transfers use credit card networks, which charge fees to the bank. To offset these costs, Bank Hapoalim began charging fees to recipients of Bit transfers in January 2023. Starting May 1, 2026, the fee for receiving payments over 25,000 shekels annually will increase from 0.6% to 0.8%, capped at 600 shekels per year for amounts up to 100,000 shekels.

This recent outage adds to a series of technical problems Bit has faced over the past year, highlighting ongoing challenges in maintaining service reliability amid competitive pressures and operational expenses.