Lloyds online banking glitch was caused by cyber attack

An online glitch for Lloyds Banking Group customers earlier this month was caused by a cyber attack, a source has confirmed.

The lender is working with UK authorities to find out who was behind the attack, which saw customers experience intermittent outages of personal banking websites.

The group, which includes Halifax and Bank of Scotland, was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack on 11 January which lasted for two days.

This method - commonly used by cyber criminals - involves bombarding websites with huge volumes of traffic from multiple systems so they overload a server.

Details of the attack were first revealed by The Financial Times.

The disruption experienced by Lloyds left some customers temporarily unable to use services such as checking their balance or sending payments.

Lloyds would not speculate on the cause of the attack. No customers suffered any losses.

The bank said: "We experienced intermittent service issues with internet banking between Wednesday morning and Friday afternoon the week before last and are sorry for any inconvenience caused.

"We had a normal service in place for the vast majority of this period and only a small number of customers experienced problems.

"In most cases if customers attempted another log in they were able to access their accounts."

Tesco Bank was hit by a cyber attack in November when money was stolen from 20,000 accounts - the first cyber heist of its kind in the UK.

The Lloyds case was different in that there was no "hack" attempting to breach security or steal information.