A new outage involving the National Australia Bank’s EFTPOS and ATM networks was yesterday reported to be blocking customers from being able to make payments or withdraw cash across the country.
The latest outage closely follows last week’s two-day outage, which affect NAB’s mobile banking, its online UBank subsidiary, contact centre, some payments processing and corporate systems.
Customers are said to have begun reporting yesterday’s problem shortly after 11am. The bank notified users via Twitter of “problems with some of our systems” and apologised. It advised customers to go to a branch to withdraw cash.
Shortly after 1pm NAB said its services were starting to come back online.
Last week’s outage has now been blamed on IBM. According to an ITNews report, it followed actions by an outsourced – and probably offshore – IBM staffer deleting a production domain name system (DNS) zone.
NAB outsourced responsibility for its mainframes, storage and hosting, desktop fleet management, printing, service desks and operating systems to IBM in 2010, transferring 450 positions to Big Blue.
