Tesco Bank became the latest banking operation to suffer a technical failure after its 5.6 million customers were temporarily blocked on Tuesday from accessing their accounts online or via mobile phone.
In a statement, Tesco Bank said: “We apologise to customers who were unable to access online and mobile banking earlier today. These services are now working as normal and we would like to thank customers for their patience”.
It said serviceshad been unavailable for a four hour period from 10.30am to 2.30pm. It declined to say if the problem was caused by internal hardware issues or a malicious attack.
In 2016, the bank admitted that 40,000 customers had been affected by an online heist when money was stolen from half the number of accounts targeted. At the time, the bank suspended some banking activities to protect customers from “online criminal activity”.
Customers of Tesco Bank were able to use debit and credit cards as usual, but could not view their accounts online. The bank said: “Customers can access their accounts as normal by contacting our customer service centres.”
Tesco Bank, opened in 1997 to sell insurance products, launched into current account banking in 2014. It has £9.2bn in customer deposits and has lent £11.5bn.
The service outage at Tesco came just days after Visa payments failed across the UK and Europe, sparking chaos in shops and transport systems.
I have had it with banks, forever not working. #TSB and now #TescoBank 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
— MumBoss4 (@Jaynex4MacD) June 5, 2018
A cross-party group of MPs on Tuesday demanded an explanation from Visa about what caused the problem.
Nicky Morgan, the chair of the Treasury select committee, has written to Charlotte Hogg, the chief executive for Europe at Visa, about her handling of the failure and to find out what went wrong on 1 June.
On Twitter, exasperated customers feared they faced an account lockout similar to the IT meltdown that hit TSB.
