A routine maintenance led to the payment processing issues at Australia’s Central Bank.

On Thursday, Australia’s central bank stated, an internal power failure caused by the maintenance of its fire control systems as the cause of its Sydney data center inability to process some payments.

Although the outage lasted only 3 hours, according to representatives of two major banks, the incident had affected the processing of payments throughout the industry.

Through its official Twitter, Australia’s central bank stated, the routine maintenance of its “fire control systems caused an interruption of power to the Bank’s main data center” and that it was “re-establishing full services”.

The processing of payments by the central banks includes transactions related to the clearing and settlement of cash, cards, cheques and electronic funds transfers. The outage however did not affect the New Payments Platform – the infrastructure behind its real-time payment services.

Later the central bank stated on its Twitter feed that retail and corporate customers were able to make and receive payments; it did not however clarify whether this meant that the system was fully restored.