Faulty wiring job blamed for banking chaos

By PETER GRIFFIN

Yet another electrical wiring job gone wrong has been blamed as the cause of a system outage leaving thousands of bank account holders unable to access their money.

Employees across the country went unpaid this month when IT company EDS suffered a power failure, leaving major banks and the Reserve Bank briefly unable to settle payment transactions.

The backlog was largely cleared by lunchtime the next day, easing the effect on out-of-pocket workers.

But an investigation into the power failure has found dodgy electrical work was to blame.

"We have completed the root-cause analysis, and confirmed that the problem was caused by an incident inside the data management centre during some electrical maintenance work," EDS said.

Aggravating the situation further, the power spike activated the data centre's alarm system, resulting in EDS staff fleeing the Mt Wellington-based building for 40 minutes.

The disruption mirrors last month's botched wiring job, in which an electrical contractor working at the National Bank's communications centre in Mangere installed a circuit incorrectly, knocking out the bank's cash machines across the North Island.