Splendour halts sales for Westpac fail

Westpac music fans who were affected by the bank's electronic banking outage today are set to get a second bite at tickets for the Splendour in the Grass music festival, after organisers decided to halt sales overnight.

(Concert image by Martin Fisch, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Splendour in the Grass festival organisers told ABC Radio this afternoon that, due to the cards and payments glitch, ticket sales would be suspended and payment records analysed.

"Tonight at 9pm we're going to suspend Splendour sales on Moshtix and check all the processes are working overnight and then relaunch the show tomorrow at 9am," Splendour co-promoter Paul Piticco told Triple J's Hack program.

Ticket vendor Moshtix took to Twitter earlier today to explain that Westpac's datacentre outage meant that cards from Westpac, St. George, Bank SA, Horizon, Suncorp, Citibank, Jetstar and Cashcard were experiencing payment difficulties.

Westpac group executive, Retail and Business Banking, Rob Coombe apologised this afternoon for the outage and promised a review of the glitch while assuring that all services were restored.

"Westpac sincerely apologises to all our customers who have been impacted by today's outage. We take systems reliability extremely seriously and we are very disappointed … we will conduct a thorough review," Coombe said.

Piticco added that around 3000 tickets were still available to the festival, which features acts including Coldplay, Kanye West and Modest Mouse.