Clean up underway after FSS crashes

Ian Rogers

TAKING THE BLAME IN THE PAYMENTS DOMAIN - Michelle Bullocl, deputy governor, RBA

The second ever failure of the Reserve Bank’s Fast Settlement Service on Wednesday night continues to reverberate. 

Australia’s real-time payments system, the New Payments Platform, is wholly dependent on the FSS and the RBA to clear and settle payments.

“An error occurred during a planned change to the software that manages the Reserve Bank’s virtual servers, which disrupted a number of production servers,” the RBA said in a statement late yesterday.

“As a result, the Reserve Bank Information & Transfer System (RITS) was unable to send or receive Low Value Clearing and Settlement Services files between 19:01 and 00:34.

“The settlement notifications that are normally sent to New Payments Platform participants by the FSS immediately following settlement of those transactions were either delayed or not sent between 19:21 and 23:47.”

The processing of many batch payments files was also affected. 

Some banks suspended Osko payments in order to minimise their backlog.
 
All banks will have caught up with processing delayed outbound payments by the end of yesterday. 

Aggravated bank customers, however, may have to wait as long as two days for inbound payments to be posted to accounts, in the case of one major bank, Banking Day has heard. 

Last year’s RBA annual report shows uptime on the FSS was 99.999 per cent.