Small businesses counting cost of NAB outage
SMALL businesses owners on the Gold Coast say they were left thousands of dollars out of pocket after an outage in NAB systems left customers unable to us EFTPOS and ATM services on Saturday.
NAB yesterday promised to compensate customers for losses suffered due to the out- age, which it blamed on a power issue with the bank’s mainframe computer in Melbourne.
Hard Grind Coffee Retreat owner David Barron said his cafe was among those to take a major financial hit, losing close to $1000 because of the outage, which began at 7.50am on Saturday.
“The impact of the losses yesterday mean we had trouble paying staff,” Mr Barron said. “Saturday is the biggest day of the week for us.
“We rely on the weekend to cover the quiet week days.”
Mr Barron said the payment issues meant customers left disappointed.
“You can’t put a price on how it impacts customers, you don’t want them to think it was your business, not the bank that has the issue,” he said.
“Some of them were very annoyed.”
Mr Barron said he had to drive to an NAB branch at Robina to find out what was going on because the bank’s phone lines were jammed.
“I had been on the phone for an hour and a half, the whole system was down, the help line number didn’t give us any information,” he said.
In Burleigh, Hidden Perk Cafe staff had to rely on customers returning at a later date to settle the bill.
Owner/manager Deilene Smith said she lost at least 25 per cent of the trade they expected to make on Saturday.
“People didn’t have cash and there isn’t an ATM in the proximity,” she said. “We were very fortunate we weren’t busy yesterday and our customers were laid back about it.”