Barclays bank customers have been issued an urgent warning following a three-day outage, which left customers struggling. Services started to go down on Friday as an IT issue hit the bank’s digital and mobile systems.
Many customers were left unable to see the correct balance on their account and recent transactions failed to show. Widespread disruption affected services, including the Barclays and Barclaycard apps, online banking, payments and transfers, as well as branch and telephone banking services.
The services were finally resolved this week with Barclays issuing an apology to customers. But it also issued a warning to people to be wary of fraudsters after the issue.
In an email it told them: “On Friday and across the weekend, you may have been affected by technical issues we had with some of our services. We started work immediately to fix them on Friday morning, but unfortunately it took longer than we hoped to have everything up and running again.
“We are extremely sorry about this – we know it caused disruption and frustration for some of our customers. We are pleased to say that our services are back online so you can use our apps, online banking, credit and debit cards, and cash machines as usual.
“Our colleagues are working hard to help customers who have been affected – if you need to call us or send us a message, we are sorry if you have to wait longer than usual to get through. If you have any questions or need some help, you can find out more in our frequently asked questions on our website.“
But the firm also had an urgent warning for customers to take steps to make sure their accounts were safe from conmen. The firm said it was times such as these that people could be targeted.
The firm warned: “Fraudsters often use times like this to send messages pretending to be us. We will never tell you to transfer money out of your account to keep it safe from fraud – please be careful and do not share any personal information.”
According to outage tracker Down Detector, thousands of customers reported issues. More than half – 52% – of complaints were about mobile banking issues.
One in 10 were linked with bill payments while more than two-thirds were abut online banking. Barclays has pledged to ensure that “no impacted customer is left out of pocket” as a result of the problems.