Thousands of workers around the country saw red yesterday when they realised their pay had not been put into their bank accounts.
Employees of some of New Zealand's biggest companies were affected by a brief power failure on Wednesday night at the Mt Wellington data centre ofEDS, the information technology company that provides the country's most commonly used payment infrastructure.
EDS spokeswoman Helen Morgan Banda said thousands of payment transactions scheduled for Wednesday night were delayed.
The Reserve Bank issued a notice yesterday saying the power cut had caused it to delay end-of-day settlement transactions.
Automobile Association staff arrived at work wanting to know why they had not been paid.
The association's human resources adviser, Adrian Tocker, said staff had largely been understanding about the delay. Most of them received their pay cheques around midday.
The disruption followed an extensive system outage for the National Bank last month, when an electrical contractor incorrectly installed a circuit at the bank's communications centre in Mangere, damaging expensive equipment and knocking out cash Machines throughout the North Island.
Errol Lizamore, chief executive of the Bankers Association, said EDS staff had worked through the night to bring the system back online.
However, he estimated it would take several hours to clear the backlog of transactions.
He said problems of this scale were extremely rare in the banking sector.
"I can only recollect one similar event, which happened in 1997," he said.
"These are very rare occurrences - we see it as a one-off."
EDS was at a loss to explain why its back-up power supply had failed to kick in when problems were first identified.
The company yesterday launched an investigation to pinpoint the cause of the system failure.
