News

Cardholders again affected by FNB outage

September 10, 2012

Customers of South Africa's First National Bank once more have found themselves unable to use their payment cards due to a computer glitch at the bank.

In this latest incident, approximately 15,000 POS terminals went offline last Thursday when a "parameter download failed to execute," according to IT Web. Cards were still usable at ATMs, however.

In the previous outage on August 28, it was the cards themselves that were offline due to a computer failure, meaning that both ATM and POS transactions were impossible. The outage occurred during one of the busiest times for card use — between 5:00 p.m. and 6:00 p.m.

FNB head of business banking, Barrett Whiteford, told IT Web that a "parameter download failed to execute in the early hours of Thursday morning." As a result, certain POS terminals could not process transactions for a period of time, he said.

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