LONDON – NOVEMBER 5, 2020: Heavy fog covers the Canary Wharf business district, including global financial institutions Citigroup, State Street, Barclays, HSBC Holdings plc and the 1 Canada Place commercial office tower.
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customer of HSBC, Nationwide Virgin Money’s online banking service suffered an outage on Friday, the latest such disruption to plague an industry increasingly reliant on such digital access due to the closure of physical branches.
Thousands of HSBC customers in the UK were unable to access online banking services on Friday, with the bank acknowledging that some users of its website and banking app had been affected by the outage.
The bank said at 1115 GMT it had restored access to online and mobile banking after more than 7,000 customers complained about problems, according to DownDetector, a website that tracks such outages.
A spokesman for the bank said another issue was affecting payments at multiple banks, causing transaction delays and failure notifications between customers.
Virgin Money said some customers were unable to access the internet and mobile banking, while Nationwide said some customers were experiencing delays in salary or pension payments.
According to posts on X, customers of all three companies reported being unable to withdraw funds or pay bills.
Online banking outages have been an ongoing problem for UK banks in recent years, and the problem is serious as lenders increasingly encourage customers to use online banking services to help them reduce fixed costs.
According to consumer publication Which?, some 6,000 branches have closed in the UK since 2015.
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