The National Australia Bank's "security paranoia" is being blamed as the root cause of a five-hour outage that hit Internet banking services today.
The National's Net banking was out of service from about 8 o'clock this morning, when staff were told it would be back up and running in 20 minutes. Services resumed at 1.48pm.
Staff told ZDNet that technicians, working on the Net banking server in preparation for an upcoming move towards a new system brought services to a grinding halt.
The upgrade will remove digital certificates which restrict hacking.
The National is currently the only local bank to use the certificates.
"It's the National's own paranoia with security," one insider told ZDNet.
"The National has used the other banks as guinea pigs because it was concerned that the other banks would have problems by not using digital certificates."
However, criticism over the slowness of the system has forced the bank to reconsider this particular security measure and a move towards the new system is expected in the next couple of months.
The current digital certificate system is the same one the National uses to transfer money overseas, so "it's very, very secure," staff said.
The National has about 400,000 online users but would not specify how many of these were Internet bankers.
"Theoretically no one has been disadvantaged," a bank spokesperson said, pointing to the fact that customers could use alternative banking methods to carry out transactions.
I am an internet banking user with NAB.
First they close branches.
Then they reduce staff.
Then they want everyone to use 'overnight' deposit chutes, where even cash is not credited to your account for at least 24 hours.
Then they say an outage with internet banking does not inconvience customers.
I am already looking for an alternative.