VIENNA, Jan 2 (Reuters) - Austria's up to 2,600 hole-in-the-wall cash machines were back in operation on Wednesday after an hour-long nationwide breakdown, Bank Austria Creditanstalt said.

A spokesman for Bank Austria, a unit of Germany's Hypovereinsbank and Austria's largest banking group, said that ATM machines had begun functioning shortly before 1530 GMT after being out of service for nearly an hour.

A manager at Europay Austria, the company that runs the ATM machines, told Reuters the breakdown was not due to the euro changeover or the large number of ATM transactions.

``It was due to a failure of the central computer's memory system,'' he said, correcting earlier reports that the large number of transactions had caused the system breakdown.

The Bank Austria spokesman told Reuters that the country's 3,300 more sophisticated indoor bank machines run by the individual banks had not broken down.

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-- Anonymous, January 03, 2002