HSBC, Nationwide, Virgin Money hit by online banking outage

Thousands of customers of HSBC, Nationwide, and Virgin Money suffered outages to their online banking services on Friday leaving many frustrated mobile app users without funds at the beginning of a summer weekend.

It’s the latest such disruption to plague an industry which increasingly relies on such digital access as it closes physical branches.

Thousands of HSBC customers in Britain were unable to access online banking services on Friday, as the bank acknowledged an outage affecting some users of its website and banking app.

The bank said at 1115 GMT it had restored access to online and mobile banking, after more than 7,000 customers had complained of problems, according to the website DownDetector which tracks such outages. Over 68% of customers reported they were having issues with their mobile banking app, according to the monitoring site.

A spokesperson for the bank said a separate issue was affecting payments across several banks, causing delays in transactions between customers as well as failure notifications.

HSBC UK, which had been posting updates on X, provided its last update at 2pm stating that "Online and Mobile Banking services are back up and running and customers can now view recent transactions. The payments issue affecting multiple banks is also resolved. We’re really sorry to those impacted and will continue to monitor systems closely."

2pm Update: Online and Mobile Banking services are back up and running and customers can now view recent transactions. The payments issue affecting multiple banks is also resolved. We’re really sorry to those impacted and will continue to monitor systems closely.

undefined HSBC UK (@HSBC_UK) June 28, 2024

Virgin Money said some of its customers could not access online and mobile banking, while Nationwide said some customers' salary or pension payments were delayed.

Customers of all three reported being unable to access their money or pay bills, according to posts on X.

Anyone else having issues with HSBC mobile banking app today pic.twitter.com/IpwpUFyC8P

undefined Debs (@debspwwales) June 28, 2024

Disruption of online banking services has been a persistent problem for banks in Britain in recent years, and an acute one because lenders have increasingly encouraged customers to bank online to help them reduce fixed costs.

Some 6,000 branches have closed in Britain since 2015, according to consumer publication Which?.