Although the cause of the blackout isn't yet known, the National has confirmed that there was scheduled maintenance arranged for earlier this morning, which should have taken the system down temporarily.
-Some things go bump in the night and have to be taken down to get them running again," National Bank's head of Internet and e-solutions, Blair Vernon, told ZDNet.
Vernon said the two-hour outage could be -the backend of that occurrence".
It was a lousy time for the NAB to lose control of its Net banking, as it is usually dogged by peak-hour traffic jams on Monday mornings - the result of a banking platform that utilises digital certification and consequently leans towards greater habitual usage.
The National's online bankers have to download their digital certificate onto a particular machine, which leaves them restricted to using that PC unless they import the digital certificate to another machine via floppy disc. This leaves many users restricted to using a particular machine at a certain time of the day - with Monday morning being a classic example of the site's peak load problem.
It's -unfortunate" that the outage occurred this morning, Vernon said.
-Before-you-go-to-work bankers would certainly have noticed it."
According to Vernon, the early morning scheduled maintenance was part of the -routine upgrade process we're driving towards".
The National is in the process of developing a new browser-based version of the online banking facility, which will see digital certification become defunct, increase user flexibility and see a flattening of peak load problems.
The National, with over 400,000 registered Internet banking customers, anticipates the new Net banking system will be installed the second half of the year.
NAB IB Users need to realise than outages for companies such as NAB are planned. Speaking to the head of Internet Banking is next to useless. Do you really think they give a shyte about an outage!!
Vernon said the two-hour outage could be “the backend of that occurrence”. I call on Blair to tell us the truth I called the support team (+61 3 8641 9886 ) and asked the Rep to key OUTAGE into there database. What we found ( and they didnt know it was there ) was a list of outages
=-) the outage is planned for every second sunday of the month...maybe somebody didnt come to work on sunday ??? Not that the staff are to blame