Barclays suffered a tech outage over the weekend that stopped some customers being able to use their debit cards or withdraw money from cash machines.
The bank told customers via Twitter on Saturday morning it was experiencing technical issues, but it was being dealt with as quickly as possible. Complaints were still trickling in yesterday from owners of affected accounts, saying they were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs.
Although Barclays didn't immediately respond to press enquiries regarding the matter, it said yesterday: "We can confirm that customer services are now recovering from the outage we experienced [on Saturday]. We apologise to customers for any inconvenience caused."
Barclays advised customers at the time of the outage: "If you need to check your accounts, please use our banking apps and online banking services, these are both running smoothly."
Despite rumours the problems may have been caused by a cyber attack or hack, Barclays revealed it was actually an internal problem, potentially caused by scheduled maintenance that happened on Saturday.
It's also thought the clocks changing on Saturday night may have also had an impact, although this wasn't confirmed by the bank.
UK banks have been plagued with technical issues over the last year, with companies including Tesco Bank and most notably RBS, which suffered problems with its mobile apps in April, having already been fines by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) after its IT systems failed in 2012.
Clive Adamson, director of supervision at the FCA, said earlier this year: "To access and manage our money we depend on the banks' IT systems being reliable. But IT outages continue, interrupting key banking services.
"We want to make sure that the banks have resilient IT systems in place that are able to cope with consumer demand, so customers aren't left financially stranded or disadvantaged."
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