About 15 000 First National Bank terminals went offline last week Thursday, after a “parameter download failed to execute”.
The outage follows a similar issue on 28 August, when a number of FNB customers reported being left red-faced and cashless when they were unable to pay for items - either via EMV purchase or by drawing cash - from around 5pm.
The bank, one of the big four, says the issues with the chip and PIN terminals were resolved within 24 hours, although there were reports earlier this week of merchants who were still having problems.
Head of marketing at FNB Business Banking, Barrett Whiteford, explains that a “parameter download failed to execute in the early hours of Thursday morning”. He says this meant a limited number of its standalone merchant point-of-sale devices were not able to accept certain chip cards for a short period.
“However, manual transactions could be processed,” says Whiteford. To fix the problem, merchants had to initiate a fresh parameter download, which is a standard process to which they are accustomed.
Whiteford says the problem was limited to FNB's standalone point-of-sale devices, which number less than 15 000. He says the problem is not linked to the previous outage around payments.
On 28 August, transactional abilities across FNB channels, including ATMs, points-of-sale, mobile banking and the FNB application, were sporadically interrupted for about 40 minutes before being restored.
In March, a system-wide failure affecting ATMs, credit card terminals and online banking occurred after a power failure in Randburg disrupted the bank's services.
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