Company says ‘faulty vendor equipment’ to blame as business owners express frustration over lost sales

Telstra says it has “resolved” a network outage that left people unable to use Eftpos machines and ATMs at businesses across the country.

On Saturday morning, the telco had advised people carry cash instead of relying on tap-and-go, as the outage dragged on into its second day.

But a spokesman confirmed on Saturday afternoon that the issue had been resolved.

“We sincerely apologise to customers for the impact it had through yesterday and overnight,” he said.

On Friday, people began complaining that they were unable to pay for taxis at the end of a trip or withdraw money from ATMs.

As people stepped out for their Saturday morning brunch, business owners had expressed frustration that they remained unable to charge customers using Eftpos.

A Telstra spokesman blamed the outage on “faulty vendor equipment”.

“Our team worked through the night on the fix and we are seeing the machine-to-machine traffic returning to normal,” he said.

“All devices should now be capable of connecting. A small number of devices may require a restart to reconnect and we are working this through with our customers.”

Sam Hay (@Hayzie26) @ANZ_AU what sort of compensation will we be receiving as our restaurant lost a lot of business not having eftpos last night?

Earlier, business owners said the outage was costing them money, and banks also received many complaints.

The ANZ said in a statement: “We are aware of a nationwide telecommunications outage that’s impacting some of our business customers’ Eftpos machines.

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“We are seeking updates from our telecommunications partner and will let you know if there’s a timeframe for this being fixed or a work-around.”

Commonwealth Bank advised businesses to switch its tap-and-go terminals to wifi.

The outage comes days after an issue affected access to some Telstra apps and the company’s website, including cloud services.

Australian consumers are increasingly turning to tap-and-go payment methods – a Reserve Bank study last yearfound that credit and debit card transactions had overtaken cash.

Justin Herald (@jherald) @Telstra your issue with the eftpos system is now costing our businesses massive income. Maybe get your billing department to fix the issue as they seem extremely fast when an invoice is overdue, maybe they will be as fast to fix this issue. #businessnightmare

AJ 🇦🇺 (@queen_khal) So @Telstra what’s the deal? I’m trying to manage a business in Rundle Mall, Adelaide and today and yesterday i can’t get a signal on our eftpos machine!! Friday and Saturday being the busiest days, this isn’t acceptable!!