Chances are that if you bank with NAB, or your employer pays through NAB, you probably spent the weekend a little bit poor. Apparently, a “corrupted file” has thrown the bank into disarray for the better part of a week, leaving thousands of customers without access to their funds.
We’re not sure how a corrupted file can bring an entire bank to its knees, leaving not just NAB customers but also customers from other banks penniless for the weekend, but at least the worst part is over now. The bank has claimed that nobody should be out of pocket from the system going AWOL, but there are still about 19,000 accounts that still need fixing.
Still, this is the perfect fodder for random tech conspiracy theories! My guess is that the bank was secretly financing rogue scientists hell bent on creating artificial intelligence to replace bank tellers, when they suddenly succeeded, and the now-sentient creation realised just how much banks rip off customers and tried to stop it. Unfortunately, that triggered the bank’s failsafe, which resulted in the weekend’s “corrupted file” explanation.
You got a better conspiracy theory? Share below!
Phil
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 4:08 PMWhen the smoke clears, I would love to see a Gizmodo Explains feature on exactly how this could happen,
Anonymous
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 5:51 PMPhil,
Just thought you’d like to know the corrupted file isn’t due to a hardware problem!!!!
Anonymous
Anon
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 1:10 PMMe too.
Really surprised the media hasn’t picked up on it yet…
Greg
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 4:46 PMEggs. Basket.
Haven’t people learned anything in the last 20 years?
matt
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 5:34 PMlike everyone else, NAB paid too much for terrible, terrible I.T. ‘professionals’
have they not heard of EEC memory and RAID?
in any case, it was probably something to do with Quantum Physics… or ‘international funding pressure’.. that shit seems always up in their business!
nabguy
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 11:09 PM@Matt : ECC and RAID. Lol. These CAME from the mainframe. We’re not talking about PEECEEs here. The one piece of hardware that’s always been consistently unreliable is the Mk1 Human.
trk
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 5:52 PMBetween the NABs recent stuff up, and the CBAs massive interest rate hikes… I’m surprised people still use ‘the big banks’. Credit unions are great – its much nicer being a customer AND a shareholder at the same time.
James-Mac
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 8:58 PMTwo of the credit unions had their books and accounts done by NAB… they got cooked too.
Think of your Credit Unions as Jetstar and your big banks as QANTAS.
Breno
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 6:35 PMLooks like my Aunt \”; DROP TABLE accounts; opened up a savings with NAB.
Brett Sabell
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 8:59 PMAhh, the ol’ SQL injecton trick.
Gorro
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 7:05 PMMaybe the bank has some exposure to the money crisis in Ireland/EU (which just so happened to be undergoing the bailout over the weekend) and was having liquidity problems(at least temporarily) and it using the incompetent IT excuse to slow down its payments while it tries to catch up.
moggyx
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 7:21 PMWelcome to the world of batch processing people. This is why banks and other institutions will have to start looking at alternatives.
Finding a corrupted line in a 2 GB file isn’t easy and I am sure this isn’t the first time it has happened. There is no excuse for batch processing in this day and age where memory, processing speed, bandwidth and real time messaging are available.
I understand that NAB are looking to move off their mainframe systems but unless they look to remove batch processing, where possible, history will repeat again and again.
Rob H
Monday, November 29, 2010 at 10:20 PMA news article said that the corruption occurred due to someone running the nightly transfers batch during the middle of a failed upgrade rollback… fail/fail
Dan Halford
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 12:11 AM“just how much banks rip off customers and tried to stop it”
I bank with NAB. And the reason I bank with them is they’re one of the few banks that genuinely doesn’t seem to want to rip its customers off left, right and centre. Yes – they used to charge huge fees like everyone else, but they’ve also been the first bank to scrap the majority of the fees on normal bank accounts and credit cards.
Disclaimer: I don’t work for them and I’m not a shareholder. I don’t even know anyone who is.
matt
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 9:56 AMI agree, and their offshoot, UBank is the most awesome bank ever. (again, tellingly, except for some of their technical IT issues…)
bash them if you will, but we seriously need more big banks like them.
paul
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 12:43 AMThe security and integrity of the system has severely been compromised. To date (30 Nov), my accounts are still not in order. When I asked NAB staff to reduce all overdraft and credit limits they said they could not do it just yet. The story of the is baloney, who knows what the underpaid Indian NAB staff in Mumbay are doing?
daevil
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 10:09 AMNAB’s computer systems were created in Minecraft o.O
The end.
Anonymous
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 11:39 AMNAB Customer service is in Sydney and Melbourne, not Mumbai. Customer service representatives are not qualified to correct the mistakes in your account as a result of last weeks issue. The people that can fix it are doing it! I understand people being angry but you cannot ask the impossible and cry when when you are told it cannot be done.
Rollz
Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 8:09 PMI have read the “glitch” was designed to hide financial exposure. Apparently NAB’s sale of its Irish interests to a Dutch bank prior to the collapse of the Irish banking system was incomplete. Or the dutch are pretty shitty with being duped – anyway NAB’s “glitch” conveniently erased records regarding its Irish transactions – and therefore its potential liability.
Pete
Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 5:37 PMNAB certainly *fixed* my account. They reversed the latest pay deposit 4 times.
Nice work guys – wasnt the $4.58 Billion you guys made enough that you need to resort to this??