The Eftpos network in some parts of the country was down on Monday.

The Eftpos network has returned to normal after a glitch prevented people across the country from being able to use their cards for about three hours.

Have you been affected by the Eftpos outage? Email newstips@stuff.co.nz

A large number of people were commenting on social media on MondayFeb 1 night to say they were unable to pay for things with their Eftpos cards from about 8.30pm.

The outage affected many parts of the country, including Auckland, Wellington, Palmerston North, Christchurch, Nelson and Invercargill.

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Mike and Johnnita Houghton ran into trouble in Palmerston North when they were trying to pay for petrol about 10.15pm.

"Both our ANZ and Westpac cards wouldn't work. Had to do a 10-min walk to the nearest ATM. Thankfully, that worked," the couple told Stuff via email.

By the time they returned to the service station, the Eftpos connection was "patchy".

"Some people got through and others didn't, the Eftpos didn't discriminate between banks."

Another card-user, Jeff Roberts, was caught out while trying to pay for his dinner at a Christchurch restaurant.

He said he tried four times to use his card, but each time, the Eftpos machine said "cannot complete".

Eftpos New Zealand Ltd. refused to comment on Monday, referring all questions to Paymark - the company that processes 75 per cent of New Zealand's electronic transactions.

Paymark spokesman Paul Brislen said information on the outage was limited on Monday night.

But the company had established that at 8pm, a network component suffered "connectivity issues" leading to intermittent problems with Eftpos machines in some parts of the country.

"It was a situation where the first person in the queue would be able to pay, then the second person would have trouble with the machine, then the third person wouldn't have any problems at all," he said.

Service had been restored to the network by 11pm.

ATM machines were not affected by the outage, meaning customers were able to fall back on using cash, Brislen said.

He described the outage as a "communication issue" between parts of the network, and said it was not yet clear whether Paymark's systems were to blame or those of a third-party network provider.

Paymark was unable to say on Monday night exactly how many Eftpos machines and transaction were affected, or how widespread the problem was.

Eftpos Central - A Paymark-accredited reseller - advised merchants on Monday to revert to using electronic offline vouchers or "zip-zap machines" to process payments during the outage.

It said the outage did not appear to be isolated to any particular region of the country.