NAB digital outage affects phone, internet and mobile banking across Australia as researchers warn consumers

National Australia Bank services have been “largely restored” following a digital outage that affected customers across Australia on Wednesday.

Internet, phone and app-based banking services became unavailable to NAB customers in the mid-afternoon before the bank issued a statement to their website saying they were working to rectify the outage.

“We’re aware that customers are also experiencing issues when contacting us via over the phone,” NAB’s website said.

“Our team is working to fix this as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.”

Customers were left unable to pay for goods and services with their digital wallets, one customer on the NAB Facebook page saying they were unable to make essential payment at the chemist.

A NAB spokesperson has now confirmed “that NAB services have largely been restored.”

“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.”

The bank said no planned maintenance was scheduled during the outage and gave no reasoning as to why it occurred.

Market researcher Primara Research and software company Airteam have released a shared analysis on the outage, saying the three-hour-long incident dramatically reduces the reliability of the bank’s services.

Airteam’s Executive Director of Technology Rich Atkinson said it is concerning to see all branches of a big bank taken down.

“A single outage taking down internet banking, the mobile app and NAB Connect points to a shared dependency underneath those channels, often authentication or a core banking gateway,” Mr Atkinson said.

“Systems built to survive that kind of failure isolate each channel so one fault doesn’t cascade into six.”

According to Primara Research, NAB ranks second of the big four banks for digital outage time in the past 12 months, sitting at 831 minutes of downtime before today’s outage is included.

Only the Commonwealth group’s outage time is higher at 1058 minutes of downtime over the same time period.