In an update on its website around mid-afternoon on 23 September, the big four bank said it was aware of outages affecting internet, phone, and app-based online banking services.
“We’re aware that customers are also experiencing issues when contacting us via over the phone,” NAB wrote.
“Our team is working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.”
The outage spurred frustration and anger from NAB customers on social media, one of whom wrote “Thanks NAB, can’t pay for groceries or dinner with no access to my savings account.”
However, hours later a spokesperson for the bank confirmed that the outage had been resolved.
“Most services have now been restored. Some business customers are continuing to experience login issues via NAB Connect, and we’re working as quickly as possible to resolve the remaining impacts,” the spokesperson said.
“We apologise to customers for the disruption and thank them for their patience and understanding while we continue to restore services.”
NAB has since said that services are fully back to normal.
The bank ranks third out of the big four for outages. According to new research by Primera for Airteam, NAB and its ubank brand had 831 minutes of outage time in the past year, beating out only the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which recorded 1,058 minutes of app and online outages.
ANZ had the lowest downtime with 295 minutes, with Westpac securing the silver medal at 696 minutes.
NAB’s latest outage, while not its worst ever, ran for over 3 hours and exceeded the bank’s entire last quarter figure of 66 minutes. In September 2024, it recorded a whopping 965 minutes of downtime.
As highlighted by Rich Atkinson of Airteam, when a number of systems – mobile, app and online banking – all fail at the same time, it’s indicative of “a shared underlying dependency rather than isolated channel failures,” which makes securing and mitigating impact much more difficult.
“Systems built to survive that kind of failure isolate each channel so one fault doesn’t cascade into six.”
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