Major banks in the United Kingdom (UK) including HSBC, Nationwide, and Barclays suffered outages to their online banking services on Friday (June 28). Thousands of customers were hit by payment problems, a report by BBC said. Customers reported being unable to access their money or pay bills.
The timing of this massive glitch was problematic given the last Friday of the month is when many salaried staff are usually paid. The group overseeing the payments system said the issue causing the problems was fixed, and the payment backlog had been cleared, BBC reported.
However, several people told the network that they were still facing problems.
What did the banks say?
Earlier on Friday, HSBC acknowledged an outage affecting some users of its website and banking app, reported news agency Reuters. The bank said it had restored access to online and mobile banking. A spokesperson for the bank said a separate issue was affecting payments across several banks, causing delays in transactions between customers as well as failure notifications.
Nationwide said some customers’ salary or pension payments were delayed. While Virgin Money said some of its customers could not access online and mobile banking.
What led to the outages?
As per the BBC report, the banks were affected by issues with Faster Payments, a system that operates “under the bonnet” of the country’s financial system. Pay UK, which oversees the system, said that it was aware that a small number of payments were delayed or not processed on Friday.
“Working with our infrastructure provider, this technical issue has been fixed,” Pay UK said, adding that payments returned to normal and the backlog was resolved.
(With inputs from agencies)