Posted on 08/23/2010 9:19:13 PM PDT by DeaconBenjamin
LONDON (Reuters) - Thousands of Barclays customers in Britain were unable to access their bank accounts or withdraw money from cash machines on Saturday after a system crash caused chaos nationwide.
The problems, which began at around 1230 GMT, hit telephone and online banking services and caused frustration at retail outlets as embarrassed shoppers were forced to abandon purchases at the till.
Barclays' telephone banking centers were inundated with calls from customers, many of whom were angry at the lack of information. A Barclays spokeswoman was unable to elaborate on the cause of the problems.
"We became aware of a problem earlier in the day," she said. "We apologize to customers for any inconvenience."
At 1915 GMT, access to online accounts was still being denied and calls to the helpline suggested the problems were ongoing.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
This right on the heals of that major east European financial hack job...
Very curious.
Didn't hear about this. Can you direct me?
I second DeaconBenjamin; would you please direct us to the source discussing the major east European financial hack job?
It pays to keep a little cash under the mattress.
This keeps happening and they won’t be sponsoring the English Premier League much longer.
Many bank accounts in England were wiped out due to hacking. Don’t know if it was from Eastern Europe but it did happen.
Eastern European cyber criminals ‘draining British bank accounts’
Could it be a result of a “normal” equipment failure, such as power, Internet backbone, etc. or a hacking result. It should be relative easy to determine if it was something innocuous, such as a power outage and a emergency generator failed or somethign much more serious. If it was the former, I would have assumed they would have announce it as such.
Or might a “hack attack” have been caught in progress, so in a panic Barclays pulled its computers down posthaste.
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