Some customers of the Lloyds Banking Group had a troublesome Sunday afternoon as they couldn’t withdraw money from ATMs or use their debit cards to purchase any goods. It has now been revealed that the cause for this downtime was the failure of two servers.
The Lloyds Banking Group which is made up of Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and TSB which has over 30 million UK account holders became aware of the problems Sunday afternoon and set about rectifying the issue straight away. Lloyds Banking Group released a statement claiming that all issues had been resolved by 19:30 on that Sunday evening.
A spokeswoman for Lloyds Banking Group stated, “We apologise that earlier today, between 3pm and 6pm, some customers were unable to complete their debit card transactions. Although the majority of transactions were unaffected, we are very sorry for the inconvenience that this will have caused.”
The spokeswoman added, “At the same time, some customers encountered problems at approximately half of our 7,000 ATMs. This was resolved by 7.30pm, and all of our ATMs are now working.”
The banking group was also keen to stress that online and telephone banking was unaffected and that customers could still withdraw money from other ATMs.
Naturally, the downtime left customers furious and embarrassed at being left without any money to buy goods as their cards were declined and they took to social media to vent their anger.
Carl Bullivant tweeted, “Wife’s card declined in Asda had to go get my card from home how embarrassing standing and waiting #poorbankingservice.”
Another affected customer tweeted, “TSB left me unable to pay for my shopping and no access to my money. TSB are a joke.”
Professor Alan Woodward who is a cyber-security specialist at the University of Surrey stated, “It is quite unusual for two bits of hardware to fall over at the same time so I suspect it’s something else that’s happened.
Woodward added, “Quiet times like Sundays are when they do things like maintenance, so they’ll do software upgrades or they might be doing backups. And it’s those sort of things that tend to go wrong. So I suspect something like that has affected two machines at once. They might have been able to cope with one out of the cluster going down, but two is probably what’s causing the problem.”
Such incidents show the importance of having a robust data backup solution and disaster recovery plan in place. Having the ability to successfully recover your servers as quickly as possible not only helps reduce potential financial losses but also helps to maintain the reputation of the company. Therefore it is very important that you test your disaster recovery plan on a regular basis to ensure that you can recover your data as quickly and efficiently as possible.
