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Computer Glitch Leaves Some Australians Without Cash
An anonymous reader writes "National Australia Bank payments to customers were again delayed today after a computer glitch yesterday morning due to a corrupted file in its mainframe computer. Upset consumers are now demanding compensation for any fees for late mortgage and credit card payments, overdrawn accounts or bounced direct debits charged by any institutions as a result of the mess."
Still the safest place until you house burns down
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Maybe some other big banks could copy this computer glitch and wipe out the billions of pounds /dollars /yen / euros / gold pieces that everyone owes each other, we could get back to some kind of normality.
Ide have had the first post, but my ISP payment bounced...
Why? Since when did lack of information stop a troll?
... Because the NAB is really one of the 'good' banks , a leader in lowering the absurd fees and penalties banks charge in Australia. I hope they haven't put unfair pressure to reduce costs on their IT department.
My bank at least seems to be trying to avoid the need for any compensation to be claimed:
Delay in processing payments and transactions to and from NAB - Update
St.George is currently working with NAB to manage the flow-on impacts to our customers which have been triggered by NAB's processing delays. St.George will work with its impacted customers on a case-by-case basis to ensure that they are not unfairly penalised due to the delay of payments from NAB. This will include ensuring they do not pay any unnecessary fees or charges.
A mainframe batch run was corrupted as I understand it.
It looks like consumers aren't demanding it so much as the bank is promising it, which is no surprise. Even if Australia doesn't have laws protecting consumers in that sort of event, the bank will do it anyhow because they have to.
As a practical matter all it'll likely take is phone calls/letters to creditors explaining that it was a glitch and no fault of the person involved. As a somewhat related example a friend of mine got hit because of a glitch years ago. The power company double debited his payment. That happened right about when a number of other transactions came which caused some of them to bounce, including his rent check. All the fees from the bank overdrew his account, he had other fees from the people he owed money to, and his landlord notified him he'd be evicted if he didn't pay. Well, the power company made things right and gave him back his money. They also called the relevant parties saying "Sorry, it was our fuckup." Every single one canceled all the fees. Since it wasn't his fault, they didn't fine him. Had they not, the power company said to send them the bills for the fees and they'd reimburse him.
So while this is doubtless a stressful time for those involved, in the end I have to imagine it'll all get worked out. Goes double since this is a major fuckup, and going to be well known.
They don't call it "servicing a debt" for nothing.
Something tells me a system administration job just opened up.at a major Australian bank.
I don't believe in time. It's a grand conspiracy designed to sell watches.
"National Australia Bank payments to customers were again delayed today after a computer glitch yesterday morning due to a corrupted file in its mainframe computer. Upset consumers are now demanding compensation for any fees for late mortgage and credit card payments,
If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
Matters would be different if there was a problem at day X - 7 that lasted for 7 days, or X - 14 that lasted for 14 days.
It is not reasonable to expect there will never be any problems with electronic payment systems. 1 to 2 days is reasonable to sort this out, you are taking an unreasonable risk if you don't attempt to complete payment to a bill at least 3 days before the due date.
In other words, these consumers should get stuck with these late fees, and learn about a valuable lesson in taking reasonable steps to ensure their obligations are met, even if something goes not quite as expected with the payment.
A person in NAB made an error while processing a batch of transfers, then tried to fix it and ended up ruining an entire batch, or about 1million transfers between accounts, and because NAB don't put through batches on the weekend everyone who was affected has no money this weekend.
....until now :-)
The pubs will need compensation since they'll be the hardest hit in all of this.
I know firsthand that at least the top two banks are not penalizing customers who either overdraw or are now subject to late payment fees.
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
This will be the first sober weekend they have had in a long time.
... are out of cash because the world economy tanked.
Although, the Aussies do deserve some sympathy . . . I recently saw a documentary, which showed how many poisonous varmints and critters are trotting around there. I would be afraid to put my hairy ass into bed at night there.
Having no cash would be one of the least of my worries.
My favorite is some type of squid, who is tiny, but a sting of it will kill an adult human in about two minutes.
Yo. "When I say it's not safe to surf this beach, it's not safe to surf this beach, young Captain!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
via a console on a windows box.
rewriting history since 2109
Ooh, maybe now they can fix up their terribly out of date computer systems! ...
or, knowing any sort of big business, just kludge it back into a semi-working state and call the bugs "features".
My sources tell me they doing their batch run on a cluster of PS2's.
If you take everything down to the wire to maximize interest, fine, but you are gambling the gains in interest vs the potential loss in terms of fees. If you are ok with that, fine, but then don't cry when you do get hit with fees and lose out. Personally I think the other way is smarter. I keep an amount of money in my non-interest bearing checking account since that is where all my transactions draw from. That way if there is a miscalculation there's no overdraw, no bounced payments, no fees. Likewise I pay things before the drop dead date.
Do I miss out on some interest? Sure, if I messed with funds all the time and tried to keep everything in savings till the last second I'd get a bit more interest. However it wouldn't take much in the way of a fee to negate any of that.
So I think there's some real validity to the GP's statement. Don't take things down to the wire, build in time to make sure if there's a glitch, there's no problem.
It will be interesting to see how many people end up switching to another bank over this (either because of the stuff-up or because of the lack of communication from the NAB when it initially happened)
I for one am glad I left the National Australia Bank years ago. I no longer keep my money in the bank, I use a Credit Union :)
"corrupted file in its mainframe computer"
Do they honestly expect us to believe this shit?
.
And a few days ago, there was a link on /. to the article of a Slovenian economist proposing to get rid of cash.
No cash + computer glitch = ??
Otherwise all of civilization will fall...
Something tells me outsourcing to Infosys in Bangalore will cause a PHB at NAB a lot of grief.
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/08nov_iswi/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield/
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/16jul_ilws/
etc..
When more than just programming glitches happen...
Well, I've never heard about a Windows mainframe...
Rethinking email
Telephone sanitizers got re-hired by Apple as App Store curators. Now instead of sanitizing the phone, they sanitize what you can get on the phone.
Mainframes run neither *nix nor Windows (usually - IBM mainframes can run Linux, but that's probably rare for bank stuff)...
Whats the fee on the Emergency $500 advances?
I've heard of a UNIX mainframe, but they're pretty rare. You've be much more likely to run something like z/OS on one than a toy OS like UNIX.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As nothing is ever perfect, it is actually quite possible. But was is a manual stuff up, or genuine failed write? Who knows (outisde the IT team)?
https://www.unisys.com/products/enterprise__servers/insights/insights__compendium/The_Emergence_of_a_Windows_Mainframe_White_Paper.pd Unisys has been slogging their large scale x86 machines running Windows Datacenter Edition as mainframes for almost a decade.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Unisys has been slogging their large scale x86 machines running Windows Datacenter Edition as mainframes for almost a decade.
Few people take that claim seriously, any more than they would believe a claim that a 32 CPU Sun or HP server was a "mainframe". Such machines are just mid range servers with a larger than usual number of CPUs.
The basic difference is that mid-range servers (system software and hardware) are more "commodity-ish" (and much less expensive) than true mainframes where companies spend on the order of ten times as much just to gain additional advantages in reliability, availability, and serviceability. If you don't spend at least $1M on a computer it probably isn't a mainframe.
Even if you do, by convention Unix is a mini-computer operating system, and Windows Server even lower down the scale, and systems running those operating systems aren't generally considered mainframes no matter how much extra RAS effort is put into them.
I can guarantee that all late fees incurred will be paid by NAB. This is a MAJOR news story here in Australia - the bad publicity is huge. If they reneg on any fees, there'll be blood in the water while the reporters circle.
I incurred some fees from a third party once when my main bank set my account up incorrectly. A simple letter was enough to get them to refund all of the fees. If they didn't, the banking ombudsman has the power to force them.
Just a note, but NAB has made an effort to get every who has lost money due to the glitch compensation. No one, or very few should lose money due to the glitch. http://www.heraldsun.com.au/business/nab-cash-woes-all-weekend/story-e6frfh4f-1225961904137 "The bank also said it won't leave customers out of pocket through any penalties as a result of the technical glitch."