Canadian financial services group Desjardins has joined the growing list of banks in the country experiencing computer problems, after ATMs belonging to its Montreal-based Mouvement Desjardins credt union subsidiary were hit by system outages.
According to local press reports, two thirds of Mouvement Desjardins 2800 cash machines in Quebec went down yesterday, while other machines would only allow cash withdrawals. ATMS in Ontario and New Brunswick were also affected.
The cause of the problem was not disclosed, but Desjardins says it hoped the problem would not affect the direct deposit of thousands of paycheques today.
The incident is the latest in a series of system failures to hit Canadian banks. In June a software upgrade at The Royal Bank of Canada caused payroll delays for thousands of workers, while in July the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) was forced to apologise for a software glitch that caused transactions to be billed twice on 60,000 customer accounts. More recently, system failures at TD Bank branches in Ontario and British prevented some customers from accessing up-to-date account balances.