The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) says a software upgrade accidentally knocked over payments systems across the country. 

The RBA has provided some details after an outage that affected all Australian banks, saying a “system issue” impacted its fast settlement service (FSS) and the low value clearing and settlement services (LVCS and LVSS).

“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 bank said.

“As a result, the Reserve Bank Information & Transfer System (RITS) was unable to send or receive LVCS or LVSS files between 19:01 on October 12 and 00:34 on October 13.”

RBA deputy governor Michele Bullock has apologised for the disruption.

“It was disappointing that this occurred and we recognise the impact this would have on people relying on the payments system,” she said.

“I want to assure people that the Bank takes the stability of the payments infrastructure very seriously and will double its effort to ensure this does not happen again.”