Internet outages hit Australian lenders, central bank

Australia's central bank, the postal service and several commercial lenders as well as other companies grappled with internet outages on Thursday, disrupting customer services and financial transactions.

The Reserve Bank of Australia said on Thursday it was cancelling its operation to buy long-dated government bonds because of the technical difficulties.

"Due to technical difficulties, today's RBA long-dated open market operations auction has been cancelled," the bank said on its dealing page on Thursday.

Many of the affected websites in Australia, such as those belonging to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Westpac Banking Corp and Australia and New Zealand Banking Group, had started to come back online late afternoon on Thursday.

Websites of major US airlines, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines <UAL.O. and Delta Air Lines, also experienced disruptions early on Thursday, according to outage monitoring website Downdetector.

It was not immediately clear if the outages in Australia and the US were linked.