Yet another financial services firm in Canada has suffered systems failure, this time Bank of Nova Scotia customers were unable to conduct electronic transactions after the bank's main computer system malfunctioned.
According to Canadian press reports the bank's systems broke down for 40 minutes yesterday morning, shutting down online banking services, ATMs, Interac point-of-sale services and other functions.
Frank Switzer, spokesman, Bank of Nova Scotia, says the outage was due to a communication problem between the computers at the bank's main site. He says the bank is still trying to determine the exact cause of the problem.
Switzer says the bank's backup system kicked in when problems occurred, and the network is recovering.
Bank of Nova Scotia is the latest in a lengthening line of financial firms in Canada to experience system breakdowns this year. In September Desjardins ATMs were hit by outages, while in August Toronto Dominion Bank fell victim to the gremlins.
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.