Electronic transactions are slowly being restored for major retailers and banks across Australia after a Telstra outage caused havoc on Thursday afternoon.

The outage meant that some payment methods are offline.

Woolworths supermarkets and Caltex service stations were among the businesses affected by the network breakdown.

It also adversely affected Westpac, ANZ, NAB, St George Bank, Australia Post, Coles, Big W, Dan Murphy’s and BWS.

The outage had affected some EFTPOS terminals and access to ATMs across the country but most had been restored by Thursday night.

“Most customer services have now been restored, and we’re working with our customers on the remaining few,” a Telstra spokesman said on Thursday night.

“We are continuing to monitor all services as this happens. We’re sorry for the impact and inconvenience caused.”

Earlier, Commonwealth Bank said it was looking into customer complaints that problems with some of its merchant payment terminals meant retailers are unable to accept card payments.

“We are impacted by an issue with one of our telecommunication providers that are affecting some of our services. We apologise to all of our customers who are inconvenienced by this,” a CBA spokesman said.

“The cause of the problem is under urgent investigation and we are working to have full services restored as a matter of priority.”

Customers complained to CBA via social media on Thursday that their Eftpos machines were displaying error messages and that they were experiencing lengthy wait times while trying to speak to the bank’s merchant services department.

“We’re aware some branches, ATMs and services in Sydney metro are non-operational due to a broader network failure in the region,” St George Bank said in a tweet.

Westpac said that some branches, ATMs and services in Sydney were non-operational due to a broader network failure in the region.

https://twitter.com/CaltexAustralia/status/1149197968169324546

The outage also wreaked havoc at Caltex service stations and Woolworths stores.

“We’re aware of a Telstra network issue impacting electronic payments in our stores,” the supermarket giant tweeted.

“Stores are continuing to trade as our teams are still able to process payments manually at this time. We’re working closely with Telstra to rectify the issue as quickly as possible.”

-with AAP