Sainsbury’s Bank Customers Locked Out Of Accounts – Report

Customers of Sainsbury’s Bank were locked out of their accounts on Tuesday morning, but services have now recovered.

The outage was said to have affected customers across the UK, and impacted both the online banking side, as well as the Sainsbury’s Banking app.

Banking outages are unfortunately increasingly common, especially as many people now access their accounts online. This has prompted warnings from experts that the financial service sector needs to modernise their ageing IT infrastructure.

Brief outage

Sainbury’s banking outage was reported by City A.M., but there has been no official confirmation from the bank, either via its website or Twitter.

The website DownDector noted a flurry of complaints about outages on Tuesday morning, that appeared to be spread across the United Kingdom.

A Sainbury’s Bank spokesperson did however confirm the outage to City A.M in a short statement.

The spokesperson admitted that the online banking service and app had been down for a short period of time on Tuesday morning.

“We had a short period of downtime this morning but it was back up and running now,” the spokesperson reportedly said. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience.”

Apparently the spokesperson said the outage was down to a “technical error” but it quickly fixed the fault.

Ageing kit?

The bank’s reticence to expand further about the outage led one expert to warn that banking outages can have profound consequences.

“The ageing IT infrastructure used by the financial services and banking industry has once again been exposed, revealing a catalogue of errors and glitches which prevent customers from being able to access their funds, which can have profound consequences,” explained Tim Dunton, MD of Nimbus Hosting.

“Moving forward, it’s vital that all banks take a proactive approach to address these issues,” said Dunton. “This means recognising the widespread issues which impact millions of consumers’ everyday life.”

“For solutions as simple as modernising an IT infrastructure by introducing a safe and secure system which is updated often – errors and glitches which negatively impact consumers, affect banking transactions or lead to online down time is no longer acceptable,” he added.

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