On Tuesday 23 September, NAB customers lost access to the mobile app, internet banking, phone lines and NAB Connect business banking for most of the afternoon. According to the ABC, the outage began around 1:30pm AEST, services were largely restored by about 4:20pm, and some business customers still had trouble logging in to NAB Connect afterwards.
A three-hour outage is an inconvenience for a person. For a business that relies on online payments, payouts or bank feeds, it can mean lost sales, confused customers and a backlog of reconciliation. The question is not whether your bank or payment provider will have an outage, but what your systems do when it happens.
What actually breaks when a bank or payment provider goes down
- Online checkout. If your only payment gateway fails, customers see errors and leave, often without telling you.
- Recurring payments. Subscription and membership charges fail, and some systems cancel access automatically.
- Bank feeds and reconciliation. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks feeds pause, and catching up later takes time.
- Payouts. Staff, contractors, practitioners or prize winners may not get paid on time.
- Customer service. Your team does not know what is happening, and customers call you instead of the bank.
A practical resilience checklist
1. Have a second way to take payment
Businesses that depend on online sales should consider a backup payment gateway, or a second payment method such as a digital wallet or bank transfer, that can be switched on quickly. For high-volume stores and competition platforms, checkout can fail over automatically.
2. Retry failed payments automatically
Subscriptions and memberships should retry failed charges over the following days instead of cancelling on the first failure. Customers should get a friendly notice, not a suspension.
3. Monitor payment failures, not just uptime
Your website can be up while every payment fails. Set alerts for a spike in declined or errored payments so you know within minutes, not when a customer complains.
Want to know what your checkout does in an outage?
We will review your payment setup, retries and alerts, and recommend the simplest way to stay open when a provider goes down.
4. Tell customers what is happening
Prepare a short banner message and an SMS or email template you can send in an outage. Automated messaging through a service such as Twilio makes this a two-minute job instead of an afternoon of phone calls.
5. Make payouts idempotent
If your system pays contractors, practitioners or winners automatically, make sure a payout that fails or times out cannot be sent twice when the bank comes back. This is one of the most common and expensive bugs we see.
6. Plan reconciliation
Keep your own record of every transaction, independent of the bank feed, so you can reconcile once services return.
For ecommerce stores
Sale days and product launches are when outages hurt most. Load testing, a backup gateway and payment monitoring should be part of every big-event plan. We applied the same thinking to a store that served 20,000 concurrent shoppers on its biggest sale day. See our ecommerce platform management service.
For raffle and competition platforms
A payment outage during the final hours before a draw is a worst case: entries fail, customers complain and the draw close may need to move. Competition platforms need retries, clear customer messaging and a documented process for extending a draw. Our guide to raffle rules in Australia covers the compliance side, and our raffle platform service covers the technology.
For clinics and service businesses
If patients or clients pay online or at a terminal, make sure staff know the fallback: take payment later, send a payment link, or record an invoice as unpaid. Check that your practice management and accounting integrations catch up correctly once services return.
Frequently asked questions
What happened in the NAB outage?
On 23 September 2026, NAB’s app, internet banking, phone lines and NAB Connect were unavailable from around 1:30pm to about 4:20pm AEST, with some business login issues continuing afterwards.
Should a small business have two payment gateways?
If online payments are a large share of your revenue, a backup gateway or alternative payment method is inexpensive insurance. For smaller operations, retries, monitoring and a customer message template may be enough.
Keep taking payments when your provider doesn’t
We build and maintain checkouts, subscription billing and payout systems with retries, monitoring and failover.
Related: with the card surcharge ban from 1 October, it is a good week to review your whole payment setup. Reliable hosting is the other half of staying online.