Eftpos outage strands customers

Thousands of customers were unable to pay by eftpos today after a switch failure at the country's biggest electronic payment firm.

Darryl Roots, a spokesman for Paymark, whose network accounts for about 80 per cent of all electronic transactions in New Zealand, said the hardware failure meant many transactions were declined.

"We had a partial outage this morning. The cause was a hardware failure on our switch which resulted in a slow response to the messages coming in and therefore a large number of declined transactions," Mr Roots told NZPA.

The scale of the fault will not be known until later in the day. Problems began about 6am and continued until 7.30am.

Rival network Eftpos New Zealand was not affected by the outage.

Mr Roots said investigations had begun to find the cause of the failure and to find out how many people were affected.

- NZPA