Commonwealth Bank of Australia has suffered a major crash of its eftpos and ATM systems, marking a continuation of the IT problems that have blighted the country's top banks over the past eighteen months.
CBA's online systems wobbled late on Tuesday, a few hours before the calendar ticked over to Leap Year, and were partially restored by Wednesday morning.
The bank says the fault, which wiped out Eftpos and ATM systems across the country, was due to a "processing incident", but offered no further elucidation.
CBA is currently four years into a major core banking modernisation programme and, like many of its peers undergoing similar modernisation projects, has suffered repeated outages over the past eighteen months as the programme has progressed.
In a statement early Wednesday the bank said it had isolated and patched the latest glitch, but warned that "some customers may continue to experience difficulties when selecting the "credit" option while using scheme debit cards such as Debit Mastercards. We are working to resolve that issue as soon as possible".
However, the problems appeared to persist for many well into the afternoon as national retailers abandoned eftpos terminals in favour of old-fashioned pen and ink signatures.
Australia's central bank last week said it is preparing a crackdown on operational disruptions at the country's leading banks following a series of major outages in retail payment systems and Internet banking sites.