ATM
obocoin CEO Jordan Kelley shows the insides before he demonstrates the first bitcoin kiosk (ATM) in the U.S. while in the House Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 8, 2014. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) April 8, 2014 Reuters
obocoin CEO Jordan Kelley shows the insides before he demonstrates the first bitcoin kiosk (ATM) in the U.S. while in the House Rayburn Building on Capitol Hill in Washington, April 8, 2014. REUTERS/Larry Downing (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) April 8, 2014

Thousands of Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) customers were angry at the lender on Tuesday because a network hardware failure caused an outage that made it impossible to withdraw money. The clients vented their ire on social media.

Reports said that a key piece of CBA's network at one of the bank's data centre failed.

The outage affected not only ATM transactions but also Web and phone banking, EFTPOS and even some in-branch services. Included in the outage was not being able to pay for transactions at shops or petrol stations.

Likewise affected were users of CommSec's share-trading platform which was down early Tuesday. Traders were advised to call the broker and transact their business by phone instead of online.

By early afternoon, CBA was able to fix the problem and assured customers it is gradually restoring all its banking services. By 12:30 pm. CommSec's Twitter support account announced that full service has been restored, including ATMs, NetBank and EFTPOS.

Bank customers who incurred penalties due to the outage were advised to contact CBA for potential compensation, said Matt Levey, head of campaigns at Choice.

CBA had spent S1 billion to upgrade its core banking system to benefit its over 14.5 million customers.