Lloyds, the U.K. banking company, saw its online banking platform go down on Monday (Feb. 11) morning, with City A.M. reporting some users couldn’t get into the website.
According to the report, the failure came after the bank conducted maintenance of its banking and mobile apps during the weekend. The maintenance was a regularly scheduled event. A spokesperson for the bank told the paper that it was aware that some customers experienced intermittent issues with the online banking service. Full service was restored in the evening, noted the report.
It’s not the first time Lloyds Bank customers suffered from an outage at the bank. In July customers weren’t able to conduct fund transfers, with the problem lasting for several hours. Hundreds of customers of Lloyds, and Halifax, which are both under the Lloyds banking umbrella, were impacted. The outage was blamed on the bank’s connection to the Faster Payments service in the U.K. The service lets customers transfer funds to people at different banks.
While the outage at the U.K. bank wasn’t too bad, it does steal some of the thunder from Lloyds Bank’s new open banking initiative. Last week the bank announced an update to its banking app that enables customers to view account information from other banks on one screen. The customers are able to view personal accounts from six other banks on a single screen.
The U.K. bank has been embracing a digital transformation in recent months and has even gone as far as to require all of its insurance brokers to digitize their business this year. In a recent press release it said that under its new policies, “each syndicate will be required to have written no less than 40 percent of its risks using a recognized electronic placement system with the target increasing to 50% in Q2. A quote target will also be introduced in Q2 2019, and all targets will now apply to both lead and follow business.”