"It's unfortunate but these things happen from time to time."
So said National Australia Bank spokesperson George Wright in today's The Australian story regarding the spate of problems that once again hit the bank.
According to various news reports, both NAB's online and telephone banking systems went out this morning and were not fixed until late this afternoon Sydney time. You can follow the timeline of events on the bank's Twitter page.
The bank could not - or would not - say what caused these latest problems, but that unlike NAB's November on-line meltdown, it did say that customer transactions were not affected.
NAB naturally apologized to its customers for the latest inconvenience.
During the November fiasco, the fallout from which the bank is still dealing with, NAB Chief Executive Cameron Clyne was also quoted as saying:
"Unfortunately, for a large organisation these things happen from time to time."
I don't think CEO Clyne was expecting the time interval between technology problems to be so short. Another major outage, and the bank may find the phrase, "These things happen from time to time," becoming its unofficial mantra. It may already be to the other Australia banks that have to interact with NAB.
NAB online customers were likely already in an irritable mood when today's outage occurred. According to this report today in the Sydney Morning Herald , a "communications system" glitch yesterday caused several old SMS and email messages to be resent to its UBank online banking customers. The bank would not say how many of its customers were affected by the glitch, but it is likely to be at least a few million.
The bank also apologized for this problem as well.
Robert N. Charette is a Contributing Editor to IEEE Spectrum and an acknowledged international authority on information technology and systems risk management. A self-described “risk ecologist,” he is interested in the intersections of business, political, technological, and societal risks. Charette is an award-winning author of multiple books and numerous articles on the subjects of risk management, project and program management, innovation, and entrepreneurship. A Life Senior Member of the IEEE, Charette was a recipient of the IEEE Computer Society’s Golden Core Award in 2008.
