Lloyds Customers Hit By Bank IT Glitch
Lloyds Banking Group is the latest lender to report a mass debit card and ATM outage as the result of a banking glitch.
For three hours on 26 January, the group confirmed around half of its 7,000 ATMs were affected but the situation was resolved around 1930 GMT.
"We apologise that earlier today, between 1500 GMT and 1800 GMT, some customers were unable to complete their debit card transactions," said Lloyds in a statement.
"Although the majority of transactions were unaffected, we are very sorry for the inconvenience that this will have caused."
Lloyds is the latest bank to report IT failures that result in customers being unable to access their funds.
In August 2012, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) revealed that it had put aside £125m to compensate thousands of customers affected by a two-week computer breakdown, which led to millions of customers being stranded without being able to pay outgoing bills.
In April 2013, Britain's Financial Conduct Authority said it would investigate RBS over its 2012 computer failure.
In December 2013, the bank was forced to promise another round of compensation after RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank were hit by an online banking and ATM blackout which left potentially millions unable to pay for goods and services or receive payments.
To make matters worse, only a day after it claimed to have resolved the problems, NatWest customers were hit by more internet banking issues after a cyber-attack knocked the bank's website down for an hour.
A week later, Ulster Bank customers were stung by another IT glitch.
RBS chief executive Ross McEwan blamed years of IT infrastructure neglect due to investment from his predecessors.
However, within the first few days of 2014, RBS and Natwest credit card customers have been hit by another round of IT problems - but this time the banks insisted that it was Tesco's fault.
Despite RBS's legacy of IT issues, the bank blamed Tesco for the IT problem that locked customers' credit cards and left many unable to pay for fuel at the retailer's petrol stations.
The problem occured when customers tried to pay for fuel but found that their Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) were not accepted, even when entered correctly.
Many found their cards locked when their PIN was registered as incorrect three times in a row, meaning that their cards were unusable thereafter.
RBS insisted that it was Tesco's technology that caused the problem.
Tesco said in a statement that "we are investigating reports of problems affecting some of our pay-at-pump services. We apologise to our customers for any inconvenience caused."
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