The Telstra Corporation Ltd (ASX: TLS) share price will be one to watch this morning after an outage caused chaos for shoppers at small businesses and retailers such as Caltex Australia Limited (ASX: CTX) and Woolworths Group Ltd (ASX: WOW).
What happened?
On Thursday afternoon shoppers were forced to resort to paying for items and services in cash after a Telstra outage led to the EFTPOS network and ATMs failing.
According to the ABC, the issue is believed to have related to a payments processing network operated by the telco giant and affects all banks in some way.
The system that was impacted handles low value transactions and even some property settlements. Fortunately, the systems responsible for handling major transactions between financial institutions were unaffected.
Telstra apologised for the outage on Twitter, saying: "We're currently looking into an issue affecting services including EFTPOS and access to ATMs. We're sorry if this impacts you. We'll keep you updated as we know more."
Who was affected?
A wide range of businesses of all sizes were impacted by the outage. This includes local cafes, Australia Post, and all the big four banks.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia (ASX: CBA) said: "We know today's issue has been inconvenient to many of our customers. The cause has been identified as a Telstra outage and we have been in close contact with Telstra as they restore their services to normal."
Fellow bank, Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ASX: ANZ), advised that many customers were experiencing problems using EFTPOS. It said: "We can confirm there is a widespread issue with EFTPOS terminals in Australia. This does not appear to be isolated with ANZ, however we are working to have this resolved on our end as soon as possible."
In addition to this, the ABC reported that NSW Ambulance and the HICAPS network were impacted.
The good news is that everything looks to be back to normal now. Though, Telstra may have a lot of explaining to do today to appease disgruntled business owners and shoppers.
