An air conditioning fault at a data centre has been blamed for immobilising the Westpac ATM, EFTPOS and online banking system yesterday.
Services went down from around 8 am but the issue had been resolved in most cases by early afternoon. However online banking was not up and running until the early evening.
The bank took the heat for the issue, accepting the fault at one of its core data centres in Sydney’s Ryde was entirely its responsibility and apologising to customers.
The ATM network down time, which lasted just over 5 hours, also affected retail transactions and transport networks such as CityRail which use Westpac EFTPOS terminals.
During the outage, customers were urged to make transactions in branches or through telephone banking.
A Westpac spokesperson told The Register that any customers who were affected by “being out of pocket” by the incident should contact customer service for potential compensation. The bank would not detail how extensive the outage was other than it was national and affected a wide section of the network. ®