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Severe storms blamed for nationwide outages of vital services in Australia

Xinhua, June 6, 2016 Adjust font size:

Severe storms which battered the east coast of Australia have been blamed for nationwide outages of online shopping websites and video streaming service, as well as the unavailability of vital services such as the use of ATMs and EFTPOS transactions.

The outages, which have reportedly affected millions of Australians, began at around 4 p.m. on Sunday evening and continued throughout the night, after many servers were affected by storms which lashed across the entire eastern seaboard -- from Brisbane to Canberra.

Many customers of major banks Westpac, ME Bank and the Commonwealth Bank were left with temporarily useless bank cards, while ATMs were also affected.

Many services were still being reinstated on Monday morning, with frustrations spilling onto social media; some bank customers "humiliated" when their credit and debit cards would not work.

"I got stuck at the service station unable to pay for fuel by card and (I had) no cash. Very embarrassing," one Facebook user posted to the the ME Bank Facebook page on Sunday evening.

"The service station attendant thought I was (trying to steal petrol). Never been so humiliated in my life," another wrote.

Australians hoping for an evening in were also affected; online food ordering services such as Domino's Pizza and Menulog failed, while movie and TV streaming services Stan and Foxtel Play were also rendered useless.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) was ultimately blamed for the widespread outages. AWS is a cloud-based web hosting platform which streamlines cloud and computing functions for hundreds of Australian companies, some of which were still having their normal services restored on Monday morning, IT News reported on Monday. Endit