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'Tis the season to be wobbly: HSBC online and mobile banking services suffer not one but two major outages in 12 hours
Luckily, it's not the night before Christmas. Actually, it's worse
Updated HSBC’s mobile and online banking services went absent without leave in the UK last night and are missing in action again this morning, just as Brits begin panicking about any last minute buys they need to make for Chrimbo.
According to outage reporting tool DownDetector, HSBC's – and its customers' – troubles began shortly before 19:30 GMT yesterday with thousands of customers reporting a digital blackout that left them unable to access accounts. The final trickle of reports came in just before midnight.
However, word of wobbles began again less than 12 hours after they first started, with customers noting service unavailability from shortly before 07:00 GMT and carrying on until now.
"We are aware that some of our customers are experiencing intermittent issues accessing HSBC UK mobile and online banking services, and are working hard to fix this," HSBC told The Reg.
The banking equivalent of "can you try turning it on and off again?" was then issued. "We ask that customers wait a few minutes and try again. We're very sorry for any inconvenience caused."
Customers aren't happy.
@HSBC_UK What's going on with your website this morning? It's like 1997 dial up? I'd phone you but you will be experiencing "higher than usual demand" and make me wait 15 minutes. Come on, you CAN do better than this.
— Frank Sumatra (@sumatra_frank) December 20, 2019
And another.
@HSBC_UK are you having issues again with online banking this morning? It’s taken 20 mins to get into account to try and pay a bill and still no success 😕
— Lisa (@Lisa_Cooper) December 20, 2019
There is no word on the cause of the troubles, but we have asked HSBC if a post event technical analysis will be available. As for when things will improve? The bank doesn't seem to know.
I'm afraid we're not sure how long this outage will take, but I can assure you that we are working super hard on a fix. We should be communicating further updates through tweets. ^Nick
— HSBC UK (@HSBC_UK) December 20, 2019
Happy Chrimbo everyone.
Updated
HSBC has made contact to say its online banking services and app are working again.
"We are sorry to customers for the disruption to access to our online and mobile services last night and this morning. Our online & mobile banking services are now fully available again. We will be happy to help our customers with any issues that have arisen because of the disruption."®