Although online banking is gaining in popularity, the number of outages customers have to deal with continues to increase. For once, the banks themselves were not to blame for today’s outage, as the problem was caused by BT, the largest ISP in the region. A major technical fault is to blame for the incident, although things were resolved around midday.
BT Outage Causes Significant Stress
In this day and age, consumers and businesses are relying on the Internet for just about anything we do these days. Checking emails, connecting to the world, or even accessing financial services, the Internet plays a key role in all of it. But when the Internet is not available for whatever reason, things take a turn for the worse rather quickly.
UK customers of any banking institutions may have experienced serious online banking issues throughout the day. As it turns out, British Telecom has been the cause of this problem, as they suffered from a major technical glitch. Albeit they solved everything by noon, issues like these should never be possible in the first place.
Among the affected institutions were customers of Barclays, Nationwide, HSBC, Natwest, and Santander, among other banks. For once, none of these institutions could do anything about the matter, as ISP downtime is outside of their control. Customer support representatives had their hands full responding to these complaints.
We are aware of an external network issue which may be affecting online banking access. We are investigating this and will update shortly.
— RBS Help (@RBS_Help) July 20, 2016
BT explained the issue as a power cut at one of their data centers. To make matters even worse, that particular data center is also used by the London Stock Exchange. For BT, this outage could not come at a worse time, as they were sanctioned for their failed investment in fiber connections.
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