NAB outage

NAB's outage took down six services at once. The disclosure data shows why that's the pattern to watch.

A banking outage is usually reported as a single event. One bank, one afternoon, one apology.

The disclosure data tells a different story, one where this week's failure is a symptom of a category, not an isolated incident.

Analysis by Airteam and Primara Research of five years of payment reliability disclosures from 37 Australian providers finds that online and app banking outages, the exact type behind this week's NAB failure, account for 2,376 hours of disclosed banking downtime since 2021. It is the largest failure category on record.

NAB's outage didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of the category that fails most.

One fault, six services down

NAB confirmed a digital outage affecting internet banking, the mobile app, NAB Connect and NAB Trade from around 1.30pm AEST. An update followed just after 4pm. Full recovery took more than three hours.

Four separate customer-facing services went down together.
Recovery took over three hours from first failure to full restoration.
The trigger point was a single confirmed digital outage, not four unrelated faults.
Four channels failing at once from one root cause is itself the finding. It points to something shared underneath all of them, not four coincidental breakages.

“A single outage taking down internet banking, the mobile app and NAB Connect points to a shared dependency underneath those channels, often authentication or a core banking gateway,” says Rich Atkinson, Executive Director, Technology at Airteam. “Systems built to survive that kind of failure isolate each channel so one fault doesn't cascade into six.”

Where NAB sits against the other three

Look at online and app banking downtime across the big four over the past 12 months, and NAB isn't the worst. It also isn't close to the best.

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  Commonwealth Bank, Bankwest: 1,058 minutes, the most of the big four
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  NAB, ubank: 831 minutes, third of the big four
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  Westpac group: 696 minutes
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  ANZ: 295 minutes, the fewest of any major bank

NAB's downtime is more than double ANZ's. It sits ahead of only one of its three major rivals. Third of four is not a comfortable place to be in a category that's already the largest source of disclosed failure across the industry.

This isn't NAB's first big one, and the industry average is already meaningful

NAB's own disclosed figure for the service was 66 minutes last quarter. Its worst quarter in five years was September 2024, at 965 minutes, itself larger than this week's outage stretched out.

Online and app banking made up 11.2% of all disclosed downtime last quarter, across every provider.
15 of the 32 providers offering online and app banking disclosed some downtime last quarter, NAB among them.
This is a category where outages are common enough to be the norm, not the exception, spread across roughly half the providers who offer the service.

The disclosure record is always months behind the outage

This outage falls in the September 2026 quarter. Under the current regime, which reports quarterly and in arrears, it won't appear in NAB's disclosure until reporting resumes around November.

“A multi-hour outage today already outstrips what NAB disclosed for online banking across the whole of last quarter,” Atkinson says.

That gap matters beyond NAB. Customers experience the outage in real time. The public record of it, and any accountability that follows, arrives on a quarterly lag, months after the disruption is over and largely forgotten.

The failure happens in an afternoon. The record of it takes a season to catch up.

About the data

Analysis for this release was completed by Primara Research for Airteam, using publicly available data of five years of payment reliability disclosures from 37 Australian providers.

Update

TheNighlty.com.au published an article based on this research on the 24th of September, available here.