HSBC Customers Left Frustrated After Internet Banking Outage

HSBC suffered an outage to its Business Internet Banking service in the UK this morning, with hundreds of users taking to Twitter to vent their frustrations at being unable to access their accounts.

At 10:30am, HSBC UK Business tweeted that it was “experiencing some issues with Business Internet Banking, but we’re working to resolve this. Apologies for any inconvenience caused”.

As you would expect, the bank received a fierce backlash from angry Twitter users. One user angrily described the outage as “a massive failure to provide service”, while another said: “It is not an inconvenience. It is much, much worse than that.”

HSBC outage

According to independent website Down Detector, the peak time for complaints was around 10:00am, with issues first arising from just over an hour earlier. 74 percent of the problems reported were to do with internet banking, followed by mobile banking (16 percent) and the website (9 percent).

The bulk of the problems originated from the London area, with the likes of Birmingham, Nottingham, Liverpool and Manchester also being widely affected.

At 2:02pm, HSBC tweeted that Business Internet Banking was available again and apologised once more “for any inconvenience caused”.

Silicon contacted HSBC for added comment and received the following reply: “Some customers experienced a slow running service on our internet and mobile banking channels this morning which has been resolved.”

HSBC’s last major outage came in January last year when its online banking service went down on the first working day after Christmas, which the bank was quick to confirm was “not a cyber-attack or any other malicious act”.

However, just a couple of weeks later it was hit by an actual cyber attack in the form of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack which prevented customers from accessing their online bank accounts.

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