13m hit by eight-hour Lloyds IT meltdown

MILLIONS of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers were locked out of their accounts yesterday after Britain’s biggest bank suffered a major IT glitch.

All of Lloyds Banking Group’s internet and mobile banking customers were affected after both services went down at around 4am for nearly eight hours.

It meant that just under 13million people were unable to use their computers or mobile phones to check balances, make payments or transfer money.

With all 2,000 of the group’s branches closed for the bank holiday, customers could only use phone banking or ATMs for checking balances. They flocked to social media to complain.

Sales executive Adam Price, 22, had lost his bank card while celebrating with friends in Winchester, Hampshire, on New Year’s Eve. When he tried to log into his Halifax mobile app yesterday morning to cancel it, he discovered he was locked out. He was unable to get through to the bank’s call centre.

Mr Price said: ‘I was worried that someone already had my card and was spending all of my money. If the issue began at 4am, customers shouldn’t be still locked out seven hours later.’ It is understood

‘Spectacularly poor way to start decade’

online services were back up and running just before midday. Consumer experts branded the glitch a ‘spectacularly poor way to start the new decade’ following 12 months of online banking failures.

Britain’s lenders suffered an average of five IT meltdowns every week in the space of a year. The Financial Conduct Authority recorded 265 glitches between October 2018 and September 2019.

Royal Bank of Scotland and Santander recorded the most incidents in this time, with both banks suffering 18 each.

In November NatWest was forced to apologise to customers when its online service crashed at 9am on Black Friday.

It meant that customers were unable to log into accounts for eight hours. Days before, thousands of TSB customers were left waiting for cash as salaries and payments failed to reach their accounts.

Martyn James, of complaints site Resolver, said of yesterday’s glitch: ‘This is a spectacularly poor way for Lloyds Banking Group to begin the decade.

‘Last year online banking failures seemed to be pretty near constant. The industry needs to review the problem to prevent more from happening.

‘Just fixing a glitch once it has happened is not good enough.’

A Lloyds spokesman said: ‘Internet and mobile banking is now back to normal. We’re sorry that some of our customers had issues with it yesterday morning.’