NAB customers vent at latest outage as the bank frantically searches for a new boss

National Australia Bank is still fielding complaints on the back of an IT outage that prevented customers from accessing their accounts for several hours.

Customers were still leaving complaints on social media this morning with some saying they were unable to access their accounts.

“It's been 10 hours and it's still down,” said one user.

“Any word when online banking will be working again,” asked another, with a screenshot of the bank’s app saying it was unavailable.

NAB posted an update on its Facebook page on Thursday where it apologised for the issues its customers had been having.

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NAB told Business Insider Australia that its systems were back up and running on Thursday night.

"We had a short period where some of our digital channels were unavailable, including internet banking and mobile banking – they’re back up and running now," a spokesman said.

"Telephone banking, ATMs and Eftpos services were all operating as normal throughout."

Elsewhere, Bendigo Bank was also hit by an outage yesterday with eftpos and ATM services going down. There does not appear to be any link between the outages.

NAB was taken offline by similar outages twice in January, with blame falling on its data centre.

@NAB Any word when online banking will be working again? pic.twitter.com/fPaEaJ5sDQ

— Ivy Eyes (@HerDearPhil) 14 March 2019

This week's outage comes at a terrible time for NAB. The bank recently lost its chairman Ken Henry and chief executive Andrew Thorburn after its defiant and tone deaf response to being singled out by Banking Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne.

“Having heard from both the CEO, Mr Thorburn, and the chair, Dr Henry, I am not as confident as I would wish to be that the lessons of the past have been learned,” Commissioner Hayne said.

“Overall, my fear – that there may be a wide gap between the public face NAB seeks to show and what it does in practice – remains,” he said.

“More particularly, I was not persuaded that NAB is willing to accept the necessary responsibility for deciding, for itself, what is the right thing to do, and then having its staff act accordingly.”

Earlier this week NAB’s incoming chairman Phil Chronican wrote to shareholders saying the bank needed to win back the trust of all its stakeholders.

"The enormity of this task is not lost on me, because the royal commission is right. There is a big gap between where we are today and where we need to be," Mr Chronican said.

The first major thing Mr Chronican needs to do to steady NAB is appoint a new chief executive.

Given the rhetoric from Canberra towards NAB, speculation has centred on former NSW Premier Mike Baird taking over the top job because of his political skills. He is currently chief customer officer of consumer banking at NAB.