SINGAPORE - All services by e-payment giant Nets were down across Singapore on Friday (Feb 2).

Nets said in a Facebook post at 2.27pm that it would like to inform its merchants and consumers that all Nets services were temporarily unavailable.

"Nets users will not be able to perform any Nets Transactions (including point-of-sales transactions and top-up services) for the time being," it said.

The company did not give a reason for the outage. It apologised for the inconvenience caused and said it is working to restore services as soon as possible.

A project manager, in her 40s, who gave her name as Ms Tay, said she was unable to pay for her beauty treatment at a salon in Toa Payoh. 

“The Nets system wasn’t able to get a connection after two tries, so I paid by Visa instead. It was not too much of a hassle,” she said.

Nets services were down at FairPrice Finest in Bugis' Junction 8 and at Bugis Junction's Cold Storage when ST visited at around 3.30pm.

A spokesman for Nets told ST that its services, including point-of-sale transactions and top-up services, were temporarily unavailable from 2pm to 3pm on Friday.

"We are conducting a full investigation as to the cause of the disruption to prevent a repeat of today's incident," said the spokesman. 

"We deeply regret the inconvenience caused to customers and merchants and thank them for their patience as they waited for service to be restored."

It said in a Facebook post at 3.44pm that all services had been restored.

According to its website, Nets serves customers of various banks such as DBS, POSB, HSBC, Maybank, OCBC, Standard Chartered and UOB at more than 100,000 acceptance points in Singapore, as well as online payments.

Its network also accepts cards such as NetsPay and UnionPay, and serves 35,000 Unified Point-Of-Sale terminals and 30,000 QR acceptance points.