Tyro has announced it has settled its Federal Court case involving a class action suit brought by merchants affected by an up-to-month-long systems outage in the company’s payments systems.

The fintech confirmed that the payment settlement amount is “not expected to involve additional cost or expense to the company”.

Despite agreeing to resolve the class action, Tyro said it “makes no admission as to liability”.

The original claim alleged that from 5 January 2021, and several weeks thereafter, a significant number of Tyro customers (a majority of which are small businesses) were unable to accept and process payments due to an outage in Tyro’s secure payment network (regarded by the company as “a connectivity issue”), affecting merchant acquiring and payment processing services.

The outage resulted in Tyro EFTPOS payments terminals being inoperable for a protracted period, and unable to be rectified through remote software updates.

As a result of the outage, thousands of Tyro customers were unable to process non-cash payments while they awaited restoration of systems, and argued that they experienced a substantial loss of business and goodwill as a result of the unplanned downtime.

Some companies claimed losses of more than $60,000 over a two-week period, with a reported up to 11,000 companies affected by the outage.

Tyro chief executive Robbie Cooke previously apologised for the outage, noting that the disruption was the result of a fault in software provided by the terminal manufacturer, Worldline, in certain models of their point-of-sale payment machines.

The class action lawsuit was filed and run by Bannister Law.

Tyro reported that it processed $34.2 billion in transaction value in FY22 (up from $25.5 billion over the previous corresponding period), and generated upwards of $154.7 million in statutory gross profit.