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Payments facilitator Tyro (ASX: TYR) says an outage of its EFTPOS terminals will extend into next week, leaving many merchants without the ability to process card transactions.
In the company's first statement to investors on the outage since it was identified nearly a week ago, Tyro says approximately 2,000 of the disconnected EFTPOS machines are being collected every day from affected merchants.
However, because of the quantity of terminals being collected daily and the time taken to return fixed units, a number of merchants will not be back online until next week.
The majority of those affected are expected to be back to normal operations by Friday.
Today the company revealed the root cause of the incident with the assistance of Tyro's terminal supplier Worldline, saying the issue existed in some versions of the terminal platform software installed on the Worldline terminals.
The issue caused a subset of those terminals to lose connectivity with Tyro's network, meaning they could neither transact nor be updated remotely.
"For the avoidance of doubt, the issue is contained and at no time was the security of the terminals nor merchant data compromised," says Tyro.
The fintech says 70 per cent of Tyro's merchants are unaffected by the incident. A further 11 per cent of merchants have multiple terminals with at least one functioning unit allowing them to continue processing payments.
However the remaining 19 per cent of merchants are fully impacted by the outage.
"Approximately 2,000 terminals a day are now being collected from our merchants and everything possible is being done to accelerate this to minimise the impact of this incident upon them," says Tyro.
Despite nearly 20 per cent of Tyro's merchants being offline for almost an entire week now, the payments facilitator has actually seen its transaction volumes grow during the period.
On a date to date basis, from 1 to 12 January 2021, transactions have increased by 3 per cent when compared to the same period in FY20.
Tyro says these figures include the impact of the Brisbane lockdowns.
On Monday Tyro customers expressed their disappointment with the company for the extended period of downtime on social media and vowed to change providers.
To date, the company has not given any indication that it will be compensating businesses for lost revenue during the period, nor has it offered customers any sort of alternative solution to see them through as the issue is fixed.
Tyro has been approached for comment regarding the ongoing outages.
Shares in Tyro are up 1.38 per cent to $2.93 per share at 11.04am AEDT.
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