THOUSANDS of customers have been left locked out of their accounts after HSBC’s mobile app and online banking service crashed.
The bank confirmed the outage on Twitter after a surge in customers reporting the loss of vital financial services.
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Downdetector.co.uk, which tracks the number of reports that major apps and websites are down, showed a significant spike in issues between 3pm and 6pm today.
The problem peaked at 5.18pm, with 318 error reports counted.
The bank’s official account tweeted at around 4.30pm saying: “We understand that Mobile and Online Banking isn’t working for some customers at the moment.
“We’re investigating this as a matter of urgency and are sorry for the inconvenience.”
One disgruntled commenter replied furiously: “Unacceptable. I’m left unable to access my funds, leaving myself and my children without heating and without the ability to make necessary purchases.”
She added that she hoped the bank was ready to receive a “mountain of complaints”.
More than three hours later, just before 8pm, HSBC tweeted an update to say that the app was working again, while work to fix online banking was ongoing.
They said: “Mobile Banking is back up and running, and we’re working to restore Online Banking.
“Issue is intermittent, so most customers should be able to access their accounts immediately upon retrying.
“Thanks for your patience, and we’ll share further updates once available.”
However, a number of customers reported that the app was still down.
One person commented to say that their app had worked for a short time, but had started to display an error message again.
There has not yet been any further update from HSBC.
It comes just a couple of months after a similar outage left thousands fuming after both online and mobile banking crashed.
However, it was not confirmed what had caused the issue at the time.