It wasn’t a cyber attack, Telstra says of five-hour failure
Telstra was still investigating why the back-up systems had not kicked in to prevent the outage or the traffic jam, he said.
The outage affected the payment systems and ATM service of all big four banks: Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, Westpac and National Australia Bank. However, they were affected in different ways.
CBA's "in-branch services" were affected and customers could not log in and trade stocks on Commsec, the bank's online stockbroking platform.
NAB's Fast Payments, NAB Connect and ATM services were also offline.
Westpac's ATMs also were offline, but its online banking services were unaffected.
ANZ's EFTPOS network was affected.
The network failure also caused delays at supermarkets and petrol stations, stopping thousands of businesses from trading normally.
Woolworths continued trading but could process payments only manually. The outage extended beyond EFTPOS, according to Caltex, which tweeted its call-centre phone lines were dead, preventing customers paying for petrol over the phone.
Last month Reserve Bank of Australia assistant governor Michele Bullock warned that electronic retail payment outages had jumped more than 50 per cent and the time taken to resolve failures had increasing significantly because of more complex technology.
As new electronic payment technologies such as Afterpay proliferate there has been a jump in the number of incidents where the technology is failing. Ms Bullock said she expected the RBA would have to increase its monitoring of the industry to try to reverse the growing disruption.
"Over the past year or so there have been a number of high-profile incidents that have resulted in substantial customer disruption," Ms Bullock told the Central Bank Payments Conference in Berlin.
"The number of software failures and the average time taken to resolve the issues rose sharply in 2018."
Outages jumped from 700 to more than 1500 hours. About half the number of service disruptions last year were to mobile and online banking channels, while card services accounted for about 10 per cent of the incidents.
Thursday's incident follows a similar Telstra outage last month that knocked out payments and ATM services for Australia Post, Bendigo Bank, ING Australia, and Bank Australia.
Telstra also suffered a string of high-profile service outages last year, including a 3G and 4G network blackout in May that potentially affected calls to emergency services. Telstra blamed a software fault.
Last month, Telstra announced 10,000 contractor roles would be cut over the next two years, in addition to 8000 permanent staff in the T22 restructure as Telstra repositions to address the loss of its fixed-line broadband business to the NBN.
Gloss