A nationwide Telstra outage is forcing consumers to pay cash because EFTPOS and ATM services are down.

Telstra confirmed on Friday the problem is affecting its machine-to-machine (M2M) data services and also devices that employ cellular connections.

“We are currently experiencing an issue with some enterprise customer machine to machine (M2M) data services, which is impacting services including EFTPOS devices and ATMs,” the telco giant said in a statement.

“We apologise for the inconvenience and hope to resolve the issue as soon as possible.”

There are also reports the blackout is affecting EFTPOS services in taxis.