Following an Australia-wide outage that saw EFTPOS machines go down and customers unable to access their funds, NAB has offered a “sincere” apology, and promised to compensate those who can show that they suffered losses as a result.
Cindy Batchelor, the Executive General Manager of NAB Business, spoke to media in the wake of the outage, which knocked out banking facilities for more than six hours yesterday. She blamed the outage on a “power issue” at a facility in Melbourne, saying:
“… we had a series of failures today, that emanated from a power issue and it isolated our mainframe. It’s an incredibly rare event, but what it did is it took a number of hours for our technicians to be able to bring our systems back up.”
Saturday is traditionally the biggest trading day for many vendors, though, and many businesses complained of lost sales, with one taking to Twitter to say “we just saw $2500 walk out the door” thanks to the unavailability of EFTPOS facilities.
https://twitter.com/cnicholsondoyle/status/1000194690581331968
When asked if there will be compensation for those affected, particularly business owners, Batchelor said that NAB’s intention is to make sure that those affected have “no financial loss associated with the outage”, adding:
“… if there was a loss this morning driven by the outage today, yes compensation will be provided to customers. So we’ll work with each and every one of them to understand exactly what happened to that particular customer.”
Batchelor said that the bank will “work with [customers] to estimate what their losses might have been” as a result of the outage, and when pressed to answer whether the bank will offer 100% compensation, she replied:
“Oh absolutely. If the customer is impacted, our intention is to compensate them for their loss.”
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