Thousands of Barclays customers were unable to make or receive payments over the weekend, with the bank claiming that the end of British Summer time created a malfunction within its system.
Customer outage
The problem occurred on the afternoon of the 24th October, just hours before the clocks went back in the UK.
With the end of British Summer time, Barclays was undergoing some ‘routine maintenance work’ that affected some customer’s experience.
A spokeswoman for the bank commented: ‘‘We can confirm that customer services are now recovering from the outage we experienced yesterday. We apologise to customers for any inconvenience caused.’’
Customers took to social media to complain, with one Twitter user claiming that he couldn’t make any payments.
@BarclaysUKHelp haven't been able to use my card all day, when will system be sorted?!?!
— Sean Jones (@Seanj47) October 24, 2015
Barclays quickly took to Twitter to ease customer’s fears, stating that they are urgently investigating the matter, prompting rumour that the bank has been hacked.
Security fears are high
Concerns over security are running high at the moment, with hackers recently infiltrating the system of phone company Talk Talk, stealing data from around four million customers.
https://twitter.com/BarclaysUKHelp/status/657906759525400576
This is not the first time that UK customers have been suffering problems with their banks. In June Payment Eye reported that up to 600,000 Royal Bank of Scotland customers complaining of transaction problems.
Barclays are going through a rough time at the moment. In July, the bank sacked its chief executive over the financial institution’s cost cutting procedures.
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