LONDON – Barclays has offered an apology after customers encountered difficulties with payments into and out of their accounts, as well as with the bank’s app, telephone, and online banking services in London. The issues arose on Tuesday evening and persisted into Wednesday morning, prompting frustration among users. While the bank stated that operations were back to normal just before 6 a.m., some users reported ongoing problems, including missing transactions and unavailable balances. Despite initial fixes to the app and online banking late on Tuesday, challenges with payments and telephone banking persisted. The cause of the technical difficulties remains undisclosed by Barclays. The bank expressed appreciation for customers’ patience during the outage, which affected over 20 million customers in the UK, handling more than 50 million payments monthly.
Barclays’ incident joins a series of technical glitches affecting major brands in March. Supermarkets Sainsbury’s and Tesco faced delivery disruptions due to software updates, while Sainsbury’s also encountered issues with contactless payments. Similarly, Argos, owned by Sainsbury’s, experienced challenges with orders and in-store collections. McDonald’s faced global order interruptions and branch closures due to system glitches attributed to a third-party provider.
