NAB outage caused by power cut to mainframe

NAB has attributed a 6.5 hour banking services outage on Saturday to a power failure which took its mainframe in Melbourne offline.

Executive general manager of NAB Business, Cindy Batchelor, apologised for the “incredibly rare event”, which left customers unable to use ATMs, NAB-branded Eftpos terminals, internet or mobile banking for much of the day.

The problems began at about 7.50am AEST and were not resolved until 2.30pm in the afternoon.

“We had a series of failures caused by a power issue that then brought down the mainframe,” Batchelor said in a statement.

“It took a number of hours for our technicians to be able to bring our systems back up.”

Batchelor said the bank’s techs “started where we thought the failure was”, only to find a series of equipment had failed.

She denied the power outage was caused by some form of human error, though did not say what had caused a total power loss to the mainframe systems aside from it being a “systems error”.

Batchelor said she was unsure just how many NAB customers had been affected - a detail that is likely to be examined in the bank’s post-incident report.

“We still don’t know the number of customers that are impacted,” she said.

“We’ve had an outage in terms of time - we know that that looks like - but we don’t know the extent of the impact on individual customers at this time.”

She said that the bank would “get underneath [to identify the] root cause” of the power failure.

NAB said it planned to compensate its customers in full for any losses they suffered.

Many of its business customers were particularly incensed by the long outage, as they had to turn customers away on one of the week’s busiest trading days.

“We have a part of NAB called NAB Resolve that works with each of our customers to really understand exactly what their losses are,” Batchelor said.

“We would want out customers to come forward and provide us with the facts. If they don’t have that information, we will actually work with them to estimate what their losses might have been.

“If the customer is impacted, our intention is to compensate them for their loss.”

Batchelor said there had been no data lost as a result of the power problems.