SINGAPORE - United Overseas Bank (UOB) has apologised for a service outage in its automated teller machines (ATMs) on Friday afternoon (July 20) that lasted a little over five minutes.

In response to queries, UOB said on Saturday that the service disruption wasdue to a technical issue with a module in the system.

Shortly after it was fixed, services were restored.

"We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused," the UOB spokesman said.

Straits Times reader James Pickles had written in to complain about the issue. He said the service outage had left him unable to pay for lunch.

In a separate incident earlier in February, all forms of cashless services provided by Nets were disrupted for about two hours in what was believed to be its first outage in decades.

It was understood then that the issue then was due to the failure of a connection module that connects Nets and the banks.