On Thursday afternoon ATMs and EFTPOS began experiencing outages across the country, impacting on Aussie consumers and businesses.
As it turns out, it was a problem on Telstra’s end.
Update July 12, 09:38 AEST:
At 02:00 AEST Telstra released a final statement regarding the outages, with assurances that all services had been restored.
There is still no clarification on why the widespread outage occurred.
A Telstra spokesperson wrote this is an emailed statement:
“All services have been fully restored and I can provide the following details for the purpose of reporting in morning programs:
We apologise for the interruption to some data services yesterday afternoon. We know how frustrating this was and worked to restore them as quickly as possible.
The outage occurred from approximately 2.30pm to 5.30pm on 11 July impacting some of Telstra’s IP network services, including EFTPOS, ATM and some payment platforms.
We are continuing to investigate the exact cause of this issue but early investigations suggest it was caused by an unusually large volume of traffic across network links in NSW.
All services have now been restored.
We’re really sorry for the impact and inconvenience to business and their customers.”
Update: 18:51 AEST
While some unnamed services are still down, Telstra has stated that most are now back up and running.
???? Most services are now back online and we’re working with our enterprise partners on the remaining few. We’re continuing to keep an eye on all services as this happens. Thanks for your patience.
— Telstra (@Telstra) July 11, 2019
Update 17:51 AEST:
Telstra has tweeted about services beginning to be restored.
????Good news. Many of our services are starting to restore. We’re sorry if this issue has messed up your night. We’ll provide another update when we know more.
— Telstra (@Telstra) July 11, 2019
The telco also provided an email statement confirming the above and that the investigation is ongoing.
“We continue to investigate the issue affecting data services, including EFTPOS and access to ATMS, for a number of enterprise customers nationally. Many of our services are starting to restore. We’re sorry for any issues caused and will provide an update when we know more.”
This resolution was also addressed by a Woolworths spokesperson in an emailed statement.
“Telstra has advised us the network connection is back up and running. We expect our systems to come back online and resume normal service through check-outs over the next hour. We apologise to customers for the inconvenience and delays in shopping this afternoon. Stores are continuing to trade and we thank customers for their patience.”
This story was originally published at 15:41 AEST.
Telstra acknowledged the issues on a national level earlier this afternoon.
In a message to Gizmodo Australia a Telstra spokesperson said, “We are currently investigating an issue affecting services, including EFTPOS and access to ATMS, for a number of enterprise customers nationally. We’re sorry for any issues caused and will provide an update when we know more.”
There is still no clarification around the cause of the outages or an ETA on when the problems may be resolved.
Telstra has also since tweeted a confirmation.
⚠️ We’re currently looking into an issue affecting services including EFTPOS and access to ATMs. We’re sorry if this impacts you. We’ll keep you updated as we know more.
— Telstra (@Telstra) July 11, 2019
According to Down Detector, the issues for CommBank began around 2:48pm AEST. Similar results can be seen for NAB and Westpac.
The Commonwealth Bank confirmed the outage on Thursday afternoon.
In an email to Gizmodo Australia a spokesperson blamed a one of its telcos for the outage. Despite Telstra’s own confirmation, CommBank didn’t name names.
“We are impacted by an issue with one of our telecommunication providers that are affecting some of our services. We apologise to all of our customers who are inconvenienced by this.”
“The cause of the problem is under urgent investigation and we are working to have full services restored as a matter of priority.”
The banking institution also revealed to us which of its services are being impacted.
“We know there are some issues with the following services: CBA ATMs, CBA EFTPOS terminals, some in branch services as well as issues logging onto the CommSec website.”
“We can confirm the CommBank app and NetBank are still working.”
CommBank is also advising not to call if you are currently having issues.
“Due to this issue, we are experiencing higher than normal calls into our call centre. There is no need to call us if you are experiencing problems with these services.”
Outage map for Commonwealth Bank from Down Detector
The Commonwealth bank has also acknowledged the issues on Twitter.
We are aware of an issue affecting some of our services. We apologise to our customers affected by this. Rest assured we are urgently looking into this and will have further updates soon.
— CommBank (@CommBank) July 11, 2019
@CommBank hi I manage a business and both of our eftpos machines have just gone down and your phone line goes straight to a message. Error code TCP/IP failure. Can you help?
— annie waters (@mister_annie) July 11, 2019
Westpac has also confirmed the outages.
“Westpac Group is aware of a number of banking services which are currently non-operational due to a broader telecommunications failure in the region. We are working closely with external providers as to when these services will be restored and we will continue to update our customers as a priority. Internet and mobile banking services remain available for customers during this time,” a Westpac spokesperson said in an email to Gizmodo Australia.
ANZ is yet to publish a dedicate tweet, though it has responded to customers experiencing issues.
Hi, there appears to be a wide-spread EFTPOS outage at the moment, while this is not isolated to ANZ, please be assured that we are working to have this resolved on our end ASAP. ^AA
— ANZ Australia (@ANZ_AU) July 11, 2019
This story is updating…