Yahoo Finance Barclays customers vent their anger after banking services go down for several hours
Barclays has become the latest major bank to suffer a high-profile outage to its IT systems, after online, telephone and branch services went down for several hours today.
The banking giant was inundated with hundreds of complaints from angry customers on social media as people found they were unable to access their accounts.
Among the problems reported were people unable to pay bills and rent and small business owners not able to pay salaries to staff.
The outages began mid-morning affecting online, telephone, mobile and branch services and continued through the afternoon.
By 5pm Barclays said services had been repaired and were working as normal, although it said customers may face delays getting through on the phone due to a “high call volume”.
The problems dismayed customers, briefly raising concerns that Barclays could be facing a meltdown similar to its rival TSB.
It gets better! Now all of #Barclays systems are down, so even though I've come into a branch with my ID to beg for access to me own f***ing account (after THEY made a mistake), I still can't. Need access so I can move over to @firstdirect ASAP!@Barclays@BarclaysUKHelphttps://t.co/0DXrKwqfRH
— Amy-Jane (@socialhotcake) September 20, 2018
A bungled system switch at TSB in April led to several days of outages to online banking systems and ultimately cost its chief executive Paul Pester his job and a £2m bonus. Tesco Bank also suffered a short-lived four-hour crash in June.
One Barclays customer Rupert Wilson contacted the Telegraph late morning to say he had been unable to access his account online for "at least the last three hours", adding: "I hope this is not another TSB-type IT crash.”
A cashier at a London branch of Barclays told the Telegraph at around 1pm that all systems in branches were down.
“Everything is offline and we’ve not heard anything as to what has gone wrong,” they added.
The cashier said the only service they could offer at the time was to withdraw or deposit up to £500 in cash if they had a debit card and get a receipt, but systems would not update until they were fixed.
A bank IT expert, who declined to be named, said it was unusual for multiple services to go down at one time, suggesting the problem had been in the bank’s core underlying system.
@Barclays What is wrong with the log in for on line banking. It keeps failing this morning!
— Steffi Sutters (@steffisutters) September 20, 2018
“If multiple channels go down, it suggests there’s a problem with the back-end system. That’s unusual because it’s normally the most resilient,” they added.
During TSB’s IT crisis branch services became more limited but did not go down, unlike the online services.
Following the string of recent outages City regulators at the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have demanded lenders improve their IT resilience.
A Barclays spokesman said the cause of the outage was "still being investigated", adding: "We’re very sorry about the technical problems our customers have experienced today. Everything is now back up and running, and we're really grateful for customers bearing with us."
