Commonwealth Bank has restored the services of its ATMS and EFTPOS facilities after an outage at about 11 p.m. on Tuesday that affected its system across Australia. The cash machines and payment facilities were back online at about 8:30 a.m. Wednesday although some cards continue to experience problems.

The bank apologised for the inconvenience caused by the system outage and warned difficulties for cardholders when they select the credit option while using scheme debit cards such as Debit Mastercards. The banks said it is working to solve the issue as soon as possible.

A bank spokesman said the problem was a transaction processing issue. He advised customers to continue transactions using NetBank and phone banking or to go to bank branches when it opens at 9:30 a.m.

The bank promised to inform clients when services are restored. Commonwealth was criticised by customers for not informing them of the outage problem earlier. Its Twitter feed was not updated since 2 a.m. of Wednesday and the bank started to respond to complaints through its Facebook page only much later.

Due to the problem, some customers have threatened to close their accounts and move it to other banks.

The bank denied that the technical glitch was caused by the extra day on February since 2012 is a leap year.

However, in the case of the National Australia Bank-owned Health Industry Claims and Payments Service (HICAPS), about 150,000 customers could not use their cards on Wednesday, Feb 29, because it is a leap year.

HICAPS's system crashed due to a software issue, the company said. HICAPS said EFTPOS and Medicare transactions could be processed on Feb 29, but health fund claims would not be processed for today. The company provides payment and settlement facilities to 35 health funds and about 28,000 doctors' surgeries. It system handles about 150,000 transactions spread across 18,500 terminals.

HICAPS, which apologised for the inconvenience, said it is attending to the problem and expects the glitch to be solved by Thursday. Some customers tried to beat the system by backdating their transactions to Feb 28, which appeared to have solved the problem for them.

Experts attributed the bug to the failure of programmers to add Feb 29 to the system, which brings to mind the Y2K scare at the end of 1999 that computer systems across the world may crash due to the failure of computers to recognise the year 2000.

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