Bitcoin Breaking News Brief

Barclays Customers Suffer Second Outage In One Week

Jp Buntinx · @http://twitter.com/jdebunt | Oct 31, 2015 | 04:43

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Technical issues are a broad concept, especially as far as financial services are concerned. These issues can range anywhere from a broken-down machine to creating a transaction backlog, and everything in between. Customers of Barclays, in the United Kingdom, were unable to access their funds due to these “technical issues”.

Also read: Barclays Debit Card Authentication Bypass Lets Merchants Empty Customer Bank Accounts

Barclays Web, Mobile, Banking, And Debit Card Payments Affected

It is not the first time this week Barclays makes headlines in the media, although neither of those times has been positive by any means. Suffering issues twice in one week is leaving many Barclays customers disgruntled. At some point in the past 24 hours, the bank suffered a major computer system failure ahead of a scheduled software update.

As you would come to expect from such a major computer system issue, all areas of Barclays’ services were affected. Regardless of whether it was mobile banking, debit card usage, or online banking, Barclays users could not send or receive payments, nor could they check their bank account balance.

Complaints started coming in through social media on Friday afternoon, as accessing money and making payments seemed either slow or practically impossible. Shortly afterwards, Barclays issued a statement saying online and mobile banking issues were resolved, although debit card usage was still a bit iffy for “certain customers”.

Just a week ago, Barclays customers were unable to withdraw money from bank ATMs, nor could they make payments. The cause of that “technical issue” was an internal infrastructure failure. To compound that issue even further, Barclays’ systems were undergoing scheduled maintenance shortly after, causing a fair bit of delay in restoring all services.

Many Barclays customers were worried about this downtime, especially considering how British ISP TalkTalk was hacked recently, and personal details of up to four million customers were stolen. TalkTalk also admitted not all of the financial information was properly encrypted, making British consumers wary of any issues affecting their finances.

Centralized Internal Banking Systems Need To Be Removed

In this day and age, it is already risky enough for everyday consumers to trust a bank with their funds. Ever since the latest financial crisis hit in 2008, banks all over the world have lost a huge amount of trust and respect. Rebuilding that relationship is all but impossible, and technical issues like these are only fueling the flame of negativity.

Internal systems issues causing these technical outages can only occur when relying on centralized servers and services. Financial institutions are exploring the benefits of blockchain technology to decentralize certain aspects of their core business. Perhaps they should start by revamping their entire internal structure first, as those systems desperately need an upgrade.

What are your thoughts on this recent Barclays outage? Were you an affected customer, and if so, have services been restored? Let us know in the comments below!

Source: Barclays on Twitter

Images courtesy of Shutterstock, Barclays, Reuters