Millions of Australian banking customers were unable to access ATM and Eftpos services on Sunday after severe storms on the east coast caused widespread damage, including a major outage at a cloud computing service used by several banks.
Amazon Web Services, a web hosting platform popular with several banks and retailers, has been blamed for many of the ATM and Eftpos problems which have affected a number of banks and their customers, including ME Bank and Commonwealth Bank.
In addition payment providers such as First Data have also been blamed by some of the banks.
Unable to use their bank cards, shoppers had to abandon their trolleys at supermarkets and frustration soon spilled over onto social media.
As of Monday, most faults have been fixed. Bank of Queensland reported that its ATM and Eftpos services had been restored late on Sunday evening.
Meanwhile, in a statement to Finextra, Westpac says: "As of Monday morning Westpac Group mobile banking services were restored after an outage late Sunday. While a small proportion of customers experienced issues with Westpac ATM and EFTPOS services late Sunday, most customers were unaffected. This issue was not connected to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage.
"While we aim to ensure continuity of our systems, the severe storm system created disruptions across our network which impacted our services. We sincerely apologise to our customers for any inconvenience."
These latest problems come less than a month after four banks - Westpac, St George, BankSA and Bank of Melbourne - reported problems with their ATM networks. The repeated failures have raised the issue of banks' reliance on third party providers and data centres and their failure to backup their servers at alternative locations and thus avoid the problems caused by localised storms.