Lloyds Fixes IT Systems Failure That Prevented Card Payments

Lloyds Banking Group says it has now fixed a system failure that prevented some Halifax, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and TSB customers making card payments on Sunday afternoon.

The outage occurred from around 3pm to 6pm and has been blamed on a glitch that reduced the capacity of the bank’s systems. Lloyds says a “minority” of customers were affected.

Telephone and Internet banking services were not affected by the outage, and although some ATMs were out of action as a result, Lloyds stresses that customers were able to withdraw cash by using a different machine.

TSB IT failure

“We apologise that yesterday, between 3pm and 6pm, some customers were unable to complete their debit card transactions,” said Lloyds. “Although the majority of transactions were unaffected, we are very sorry for the inconvenience that this will have caused. At the same time, some customers encountered problems at approximately half of our 7000 ATMs. This was resolved by 7.30pm, and all of our ATMs are now working.”

Customers of the affected banks took to Twitter to express their anger and embarrassment at being unable to use their card to pay for restaurant bills and shopping. Others criticised the lack of information; customers whose cards were refused complained that they had been kept waiting on telephone lines for “hours” only to be told the problem was with the bank, not their card.

TSB CEO Paul Pester attempted to offer some light on the situation by responding to comments and sharing some details.

The cause of the problems at TSB is now fixed. It’ll take a while to sort the backlog. Sorry customers may have problems for an hour or so

— Paul Pester | (@PaulPester) January 26, 2014

TSB will be worried about any reputational damage given that the bank is expected to be spun off from Lloyds Banking Group later this year following a European Commission ruling that the government’s purchase of a stake in the group in 2009 amounted to state aid.

However it can take some solace in the fact that this is not the first time an IT systems failure has affected a British Bank. Customers of RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank were hit by a huge outage in June 2012 that prevented them for making or receiving payments through their bank accounts for days. State-owned RBS blamed the problems on a payments software upgrade, but then suffered yet another failure last March last year.

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