Second TSB Bank Account Outage Affects ‘Thousands’

TSB customers in the U.K. were unable to access their online accounts Monday  (Sept. 3), four months after customer data transferred caused an outage at the U.K. bank challenger that hurt its reputation.

According to a report in the Financial Times, TSB turned to Twitter Monday to apologize for what it called “intermittent issues with internet banking and the mobile app.” The bank said account holders faced various issues such as the system not recognizing passwords and the app not able to register an Internet connection even though the device was able to access other apps and online services. TSB warned customers that it would have a four-hour outage this past weekend to carry out planned maintenance to its online banking services. It told the Financial Times that the problems occurred before informing customers Monday that they had been resolved. It acknowledged hours later on Twitter that some customers were still having problems, noted the report.

A TSB spokesperson could not tell the Financial Times how many customers were affected, beyond stating, “I would expect it to be in the thousands” and that the problem was “currently being investigated.” According to the report, the spokesperson noted close to 2 million people are registered for online banking.

This comes after major problems in April in which hundreds of thousands of customers were locked out of their online banking accounts for weeks.  The report noted that TSB in August was forced to delay its plan to shift millions of its Visa debit card holders to Mastercard. It is now pushing that back to 2020. The Financial Times noted its past IT problems have cost it £176m, resulting in its first-ever pre-tax loss in the first six months of 2018. At the same time, the bank is seeing some of its most senior executives gearing up to leave the company, including Treasurer Ian Firth, Head of Human Resources Rachel Lock and Chief Marketing Officer Nigel Gilbert.