LONDON, Jan 1 (Reuters) - Britain's Lloyds Banking Group
suffered an outage on Wednesday that left customers of
its Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland operations unable to
access their accounts online.
Disruption to online services is a periodic problem for
Britain's banks, and last month regulators told lenders that
they needed to boost their ability to resolve problems swiftly.
Customers of Lloyds Banking Group said on social media that
they were unable to use the bank's mobile apps or websites to
access their accounts on the first day of 2020, a public holiday
in Britain when bank branches are shut.
"We know our customers are having issues with internet
and/or mobile banking. We're sorry about this and we're working
to have it back to normal soon," the group said in a statement.
The problem has been going on for several hours and a
spokeswoman said she did not have any information on how soon it
would be fixed or how many account holders were affected.
Customers of TSB, a lender owned by Spain's Sabadell
, suffered weeks of disruption in 2018 due to an IT
failure that drew criticism from parliament and regulators and
ultimately forced its chief executive, Paul Pester, to resign.
(Reporting by David Milliken; Editing by Angus MacSwan)