A power failure to a router left some St George Bank Internet banking customers unable to log on or process transactions early on Friday.
"Customers from certain Internet service providers (ISPs) wouldn't have been able to log on for a period of less than 30 minutes," a St George Bank spokeswoman said.
While no further technical information was available, the spokeswoman said the hiccup was not considered a major problem, and added that the bank's CIO John Loebenstein said that such issues also regularly occur at other organisations.
A message to St George's Internet banking customers during the hiccup said: "Error: Your last transaction may not have been processed. Please logout and logon again. Then, select Details to view your Account Transaction History and confirm if the last transaction was processed. Apologies for any inconvenience."
Unable to confirm what steps the bank is taking to prevent such issues from regularly occurring, or why a "power failure to one router" was able to affect customers trying to access Internet banking, the spokeswoman confirmed that the bank is undertaking scheduled systems maintenance on Saturday June 21 2003.
The spokeswoman said the bank's Internet banking will be unavailable from 1am to 10am Saturday June 21 due to "maintenance of the bank's mainframe system".
"It's not anything to do with Internet banking. It just means that for that specified period of time, we are making Internet banking unavailable for customers. But phone banking will be available for customers wanting to make transactions at that time.
"It's just part of normal maintenance of the mainframe IT system. We do it at that time - early hours of Saturday morning - to minimise the affect on customers."