BUDAPEST (Reuters) – Hungary’s central bank on Saturday instructed the country’s financial institutions to immediately start refunding customers after Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ:) electronic payment service mistakenly charged hundreds of thousands of accounts in the country earlier this week.
The central bank said some 780,000 erroneous charges totalling more than 2 billion forints ($5.43 million) had been made on Wednesday night, adding that the incident was caused by a technical glitch at Apple’s online store’s international bank card partner.
The Hungarian National Bank’s statement was the first official indication of the scale of the problem, but did not disclose the names of Apple’s bank card partners.
The central bank, which also regulates the financial sector, said the issue was not the result of a cyber attack.
“NBH is not satisfied with the current pace of the process and calls on financial service providers to start repaying their customers immediately,” the bank said.
The report said the delay in Hungarian banks’ response was “completely unacceptable” and called on them to start repaying customers who had not yet applied for compensation.
Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The central bank said it would launch a thorough investigation to examine whether Hungarian banks’ handling of complaints and refunds after the incident was in line with existing regulations.
(1 dollar = 368.58 forints)
