TSB Suffers Another Online Banking Outage

Customers of TSB have suffered an outage to their online banking and mobile apps services on Wednesday, it is being reported.

According to the DownDetector website, hundreds of customers began complaining of problems on Wednesday 1 April 2020, starting at 10am. The problems seem to have eased off around 1pm the same day.

Earlier this year, Banco Sabadell, the fourth largest bank group in Spain and owner of TSB, signed a ten year with IBM Services.

Previous outage

That $1 billion deal saw IBM run and overhaul the IT and cloud services at Sabadell, to aid it in the digitisation and “strategic evolution of its business model.”

It should be remembered that TSB was engulfed in an IT meltdown in 2018 when it moved its five million customers and their 1.3 billion records from a banking platform it was renting from former owner (Lloyds Banking Group) to its new ‘state-of-the-art’ platform developed by Banco de Sabadell.

The move saw TSB inadvertently lock up to 1.9 million customers out of their accounts.

Late last year a long- awaited report concluded that a lack of testing at one of TSB’s data centres by Sabis, the IT services arm of Sabadell, coupled with poor judgement of Carlos Abarca, the bank’s chief information officer at the time, were to blame for the IT failure.

The IT fiasco resulted in TSB’s chief executive Paul Pester stepping down in September 2018, despite his repeated apologies to customers.

But others felt that Pester took the blame for Sabadell, and its chaotic data migration process, which cost TSB more than £400m.

TSB in December fired as many as five of its staff, over claims they took advantage of a compensation system setup after its IT fiasco in 2018.

New outage

But this week a fresh problem emerged when TSB customers were unable to access online banking and mobile app services for both Android and iOS.

Customers were reportedly greeted with an “unexpected error” message.

TSB told the BBC it was “working to resolve” the issue as soon as possible.

“We’re aware a number of customers are currently experiencing problems across our mobile app and internet banking,” it reportedly said.

“We’re working to solve this as soon as possible and apologise for any inconvenience caused.”

It should be noted that TSB suffered an IT failure in November that meant salaries and other payments were not paid into some TSB customers’ accounts.

The bank said at the time the incident had been due to a “processing error”.

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