National Australia Bank has apologised for an outage that downed ATMs, Eftpos and online banking across the country and has vowed to compensate customers who suffered losses.

Banking services were restored about five hours after the major outage struck on Saturday, angering NAB customers across Australia.

A power issue was to blame for a series of faults that hit the bank’s mainframe in Melbourne, taking out its major services nationwide.

“It has had an incredible impact on our customers and for that we’re incredibly sorry,” NAB Business executive general manager Cindy Batchelor told reporters in Melbourne.

NAB says all customers are invited to speak with the bank about the losses they suffered in the outage and they will be compensated.

Frustrated customers shared their stories during the outage, including businesses that lost sales because they could not process Eftpos payments.

Customers overseas complained of being unable to pay for taxi fares and other things because of the outage.

The NAB executive Anthony Healy issued a video apology for the outage on social media, saying it was “not good enough”.

Customers of NAB-owned BNZ in New Zealand faced similar problems.

Commonwealth Bank customers also reported problems on Saturday.

“We’re aware of an issue with some merchant terminals that connect to the Optus network. We apologise for this and we’re working hard to restore as soon as possible,” the Commonwealth Bank tweeted just after 1pm.



