A nationwide Telstra network outage last Friday caused consumer chaos into the weekend.

Merchants were left unable to use EFTPOS, and bank customers found themselves unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.

Telstra Enterprise issued statements saying the fault started in its machine-to-machine (M2M) data services network, affecting EFTPOS terminals and ATMs.

By Saturday morning, Telstra Enterprise said engineers had begun to re-establish connectivity for the M2M network, though many devices were impacted.

The outage was partly blamed on faulty vendor equipment, but Telstra has not revealed what the equipment was, or name of the vendor in question.

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) warned earlier this year that resilience in the payments systems is concerning.

“These sorts of outages disrupt commerce and erode trust of consumers in payment systems,” the RBA’s Assistant Governor for Financial Systems, Michelle Bullock said at the time.

“Regulators are therefore starting to focus on the operational risks associated with retail payment systems and whether the operators and the participants are meeting appropriately high standards of resilience.

“These sorts of outages disrupt commerce and erode trust of consumers in payment systems,” Ms Bullock said.

“Regulators are therefore starting to focus on the operational risks associated with retail payment systems and whether the operators and the participants are meeting appropriately high standards of resilience.”