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back to article National Australia Bank starts week with TITSUP*

IBM customer National Australia Bank has started the week badly, hammered by an outage that's taken ATM and merchant facilities offline. About 1pm October 10, Sydney time, the bank said systems were beginning to return to normal after an outage lasting at least 90 minutes. The bank had a horror week last week, having to issue …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The bank had a horror week last week, having to issue apologies for several outages. One, according to IT News, happened because an offshore IBM staffer deleted a key DNS record (here).

    If it isn't payroll systems for state governments or census websites, it's banking systems. … *sigh*!

    2 0 Reply
  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ATM and merchant facilities only? Doesn't sound like something that'll fall in IBM's space.

    0 1 Reply
  3. Neoc

    Tsk, Tsk

    Shouldn't that be Total Inability To Support Usual Payments?

    2 0 Reply
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Joke

      Re: Tsk, Tsk

      > Shouldn't that be Total Inability To Support Usual Payments?

      Total Inability To Support Unauthorised Payments - the fraudsters would have been hit as well.

      0 0 Reply
  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Loathed

    Contractor at NAB (so AC obviously).

    It's actually hard to express in semi-polite words how loathed IBM are among the rank and file at NAB.

    Why senior management continues to deal with them is a mystery to all, apart from speculation about compromising photography.

    3 0 Reply
    1. P. Lee
      Reply Icon

      Re: Loathed

      > Why senior management continues to deal with them is a mystery to all, apart from speculation about compromising photography.

      and a deal on mainframe maintenance?

      0 0 Reply
    2. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Loathed

      NAB management brought in IBM to do their dirty work. Unlike ANZ who moved most of their work offshore themselves.

      0 0 Reply
  5. Chris Hills

    Blame the contractor

    Not our fault, gov!

    0 0 Reply
  6. Your alien overlord - fear me
    FAIL

    Which is why

    you still need to carry cash in your wallet.

    At my local M & S, half they tap-to-pay machines have failed so you need to shove in your card and remember your PIN. Apple users just stand there looking confused !!!

    1 0 Reply
  7. Nate Amsden

    this is why

    Developers aren't allowed to touch production.

    3 0 Reply
    1. 404
      Reply Icon

      Re: this is why

      Also why admins *should* be allowed to beat the shit out of developers.

      1 0 Reply
  8. Griffo

    Nothing has changed then..

    I was working as a contractor at the NAB at the time it was outsourced to IBM in 2010. It wasn't long before the first serious outage occurred. It was pretty famous at the time as NAB wholesale couldn't do the overnight inter-bank transfers (NAB wholesale is the hub of all interbank transfers in Australia) so people were not being paid. That one was down to an IBM developer in India pushing an untested, unauthorised change. That was a particularly nasty one, which necessitated a "restore from backup and roll forward all changes from the journal, inspecting every single one manually" style recovery for their core banking platform. It was about as serious as it could get in a bank.

    It appears that over the last couple of weeks the latest round of cheap offshore labour that IBM has thrown at the account has not been given a suitable history lesson before being let loose on the production platforms.

    2 0 Reply
  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    And they've done it again!

    Not sure if its the same "root cause" but the fact that it went down yet again this week … and we thought Telstra had a monopoly on going TITSUP.

    1 0 Reply

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