Network failure takes out NAB services

The National Australia Bank (NAB) is recovering from a five-hour phone and internet banking outage after a network failure that affected its East Melbourne data centre.

The outage affected NAB's internet banking, telephone banking, some business services and Ubank from just after 6am today.

A NAB spokesperson told iTnews that services were restored at about 10.30am, although customers may experience delays due to increased traffic.

NAB's ATM and EFTPOS networks were not affected by the outage, the spokesperson said.

A Telstra spokeswoman told iTnews that there was an issue affecting its connectivity with NAB this morning. The telco was working to assess the impact of the network outage on customers, she said.

Multiple providers were involved, she said.

NAB is due to move out of its ageing East Melbourne data centre into a new Digital Realty facility by September 2014.

In late July, the bank deployed a 'virtual contact centre' platform, replacing legacy PABX systems with a VoIP-system, hosted in its two Melbourne data centres.

The Reserve Bank of Australia in March said it had been tracking banking outages for some time, in advance of establishing a formal outage reporting regime.

It said outages affected the Australian payments system as a whole, because customers across the system would not be able to transact with the unreachable financial institution.