HSBC Outage Leaves Customers In The Dark

HSBC customers received a big apology from the bank on Tuesday (Jan. 5) after its online personal banking service was knocked offline for a second day by technical issues.

In a statement, John Hackett, HSBC’s UK Chief Operating Officer said: “Our customers continue to have issues with HSBC online and mobile banking. We profoundly apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We will ensure customers do not lose out as a result of this issue. Any fees customers incur as a result of this outage will be waived.”

Hackett went on to say that the company’s Internet banking system is dealing with a “complex technical issue,” and that the outage was in no way caused by a cyber attack or malicious act.

As Reuters reported, the bank’s mobile banking services have not been impacted, but some customers have reported delays due to a surge in the volume and high demand of users.

It was also confirmed that HSBC business customers are still able to access both online and mobile banking services, but the bank did say these services were running on reduced capacity due to the outage affecting the online personal banking service.

Unfortunately for HSBC customers, this is not the first time a technical glitch has caused problems for the bank’s services.

Last year, business customers of Europe’s largest bank were in uproar when a technology issue disrupted thousands of payment transactions.

The glitch impacted payments made from companies processed through Britain’s Bacs system, which handles the electronic transactions, Reuters reported at the time.

“Approximately 275,000 payments have been affected, including payments to customers of other banks,” HSBC explained to Reuters in August 2015.

While the bank confirmed customers could expect the transactions to be processed over the course of the weekend, many customers who expected to receive their monthly wages were left with nothing to do but wait for the money to become available.

“This appears to be yet another serious IT failure by one of the major clearing banks,” lawmaker Andrew Tyrie, who chairs parliament’s Treasury Committee, told Reuters at the time.

The Royal Bank of Scotland confirmed 600,000 of its credit and debit transactions were held up due to a system glitch in 2015 as well.

The bank reported that hundreds of thousands of transfers went missing due to a computer system failure, which closely resembled the cause of its other major IT meltdown back in 2012. In 2014, the bank was fined $87 million for the earlier fiasco, which locked millions of customers out of accounts and knocked out payments processing systems.