Barclays ‘Recovering’ From Weekend System Outage

Barclays said it is “recovering” from technical issues that left some customers unable to withdraw cash or access online banking over the weekend.

The problems were caused by an internal technical fault that occurred ahead of scheduled maintenance, the bank said.

‘Recovering’

The fault wasn’t caused by the maintenance, but the fact that maintenance was being carried out delayed the bank’s efforts to recover from the fault, Barclays said in a statement.

“We can confirm that customer services are now recovering from the outage we experienced yesterday (Saturday),” Barclays said in a statement on Sunday. “We apologise to customers for any inconvenience caused.”

The bank said systems were restored gradually so that some users would see services return before others.

The issues began on Saturday morning, according to customer reports, and around midday Barclays acknowledged on Twitter that it was “experiencing technical issues” that were “being investigated urgently”.

Shortly afterward, the bank notified users via Twitter that it was carrying out “essential pre-planned maintenance” timed to coincide with the end of British Summer Time. The maintenance was planned to continue through to 02:15 GMT on Sunday morning.

Sunday problems

Customers continued to report problems accessing cash on Sunday morning. Barclays said in a Sunday morning tweet that its mobile and online banking systems were “running smoothly” and advised users to access their accounts via these methods, since its call centres were seeing “high volumes” of calls.

Barclays confirmed that the problems were not related to any external attack. Telecoms provider TalkTalk saw the personal and financial details of about four million of its customers stolen by hackers last week.

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