The problems started after Australia Post and NAB
implemented an upgrade. NAB who rely on Australia Post’s SecurePay system has
not explained to customers what caused the problem.

What NAB are telling merchants is that they still don’t know
how an upgrade went so disastrously wrong.

Insiders at Australia Post have told ChannelNews that both
organisations are disputing as to who is liable for the problem.

Australia Post claims the problem is “fixed”, NAB
claims that they are operating in “hypercare” care mode.

Australia Post owns SecurePay, which NAB Transact is based
on, and is the technical service provider for NAB. It “unreservedly
apologised” for the problems when they occurred mid last week.

As of Sunday, NAB’s business customer support site was still
reporting that NAB Transact was in “hypercare” and the “root
cause” of the outage remained unknown.

Before last week Fairfax Media reported there had been
“intermittent log-in issues, time-outs, outages and/or slow
performance”, an Australia Post spokeswoman said.

These problems were due to an unexpected jump in traffic
that NAB Transact couldn’t cope with, she said.

It “successfully performed” and upgrade to NAB
Transact on June 2 to deal with the higher volumes, the spokeswoman said.
Several businesses contradict the timing of this, saying they were told the
upgrade was applied on the weekend of May 30-31.

By last Monday, businesses that use NAB Transact (often via
third parties like PayPal’s Braintree or Stripe), including retailers Jeanswest
and Marcs and many purely online businesses, began complaining of thousands of
dollars in lost sales due to numerous failed credit card transactions, slow performance
leading to “time-outs”, “bad gateway” errors.

On Friday, Australia Post said all of these issues had been
resolved. But some, such as Marcs, were still reporting intermittent problems
accepting card payments on Sunday and were telling customers to use PayPal if
they had trouble paying by credit card.