"We had a severe hardware failure that created a electrical short that took out three independent UPS systems. It also corrupted power so our failover capability did not operate as it should have," Smith said in detailing how the problems arose. He said the outage was a week and a half ago and that many banking customers were without services for several hours. "It is deeply disappointing," says Smith. He said the company has made progress in its efforts to deal with such problems.