Quantcast
Menu
Save, make, understand money

News

Massive bank app outage at several major banks

Emma Lunn
Written By:
Emma Lunn
Posted:
Updated:
20/08/2021

A number of high street banks, including Santander, HSBC, Halifax, and Natwest, are suffering outages to their mobile banking this morning.

Hundreds of banking customers have complained about being locked out of their accounts or being unable to logon to banking apps.

The issues started early this morning according to outage monitoring website Downdetector. The website showed a surge in reported issues at Santander, HSBC, TSB, First Direct, Natwest, Co-op Bank, RBS and Halifax.

The scale of the issue raises several questions. Several major banking groups, all running completely separate banking operations, are affected. Some banks have suggested the problems lie with customers’ broadband connections, rather than the banks, and have suggested people logon using mobile data rather than wi-fi.

Santander’s social media team @santanderukhelp Tweeted a standard response to complaints. It said: “We have had some customers report issues with logging on. Please switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data or vice versa, if this doesn’t work please try uninstalling and reinstalling the app. Let us know if this works.”

But some Santander customers reported that switching to mobile data, instead of wi-fi, didn’t solve the problem.

The @TSB Twitter account also suggested customers try and logon via mobile data, rather than wi-fi.

In response to customer complaints @Natwest_Help Tweeted: “We are aware some customers are having issues accessing the service when doing so via certain network providers. Can you please try this again using your mobile data as a hot spot or using a different connection and let me know if you can gain access to the service?”

First Direct also seemed to suggest the problem was with customers’ broadband connection, Tweeting the following in response to a customer complaint: “Sorry you’re having a problem logging on today, if you haven’t already please try switching your internet connection (from WiFi to 4G for example) to see if that resolves it. If it does you may need to contact your service provider should the issue persist.”

Your Money has contacted the banks involved for a response.