TSB suffers another weekend of downtime

Weekend downtime planned by TSB for Saturday morning is still causing problems for customers

TSB customers have suffered another weekend of downtime, this time affecting the bank's mobile app and online services, following what would appear to be another botched upgrade.

The bank had scheduled an upgrade for between 11pm on Friday and 3am on Saturday. However, many customers have been plagued by problems since then, with the bank claiming that it had finally solved the problems this morning - only to withdraw the claim hours later.

TSB only admitted last night that it had an "intermittent" issue affecting users of both the online and mobile banking services, but tweeted this morning that the problems had been fixed - only for customers to claim that they hadn't.

A spokesperson said: "We're really sorry that some of our customers are experiencing intermittent issues with online and mobile banking.

"There was an issue yesterday afternoon which was resolved, however customers may be experiencing a slowness in service. Customers are still able to use their cards as normal. We'd like to apologise for any inconvenience this may cause."

In consequence, customers have been unable to transfer funds, with some complaining about overdrafts accrued as a result. Many customers have suggested that this latest outage, after a summer of IT troubles at TSB, is the last straw.

The bank, which is owned by Spain's Banco Sabadell, suffered a catastrophic IT failure in April following a botched attempt to migrate from the banking platform of its former parent Lloyds Bank to Banco Sabadell's IT platform.

Two million customers lost access to online banking services for more than a week, and the company's contact centre also went into meltdown due to a lack of staff able to take a spike in calls.

In July, the bank admitted that the IT failure had cost £176.4 million, as a pre-tax profit of £108.3 million turned into a loss of £107.4 million for the six months to the end of June.

And in June, TSB was branded the 'Truly Shambolic Bank' by MPs yesterday after CEO Paul Pester made a second appearance at the House of Commons, revealing that at least 1,300 people had been defrauded following April's IT migration meltdown.

Pester also revealed that 12,500 people had left the bank since the failed system overhaul in April.

This platform migration was intended to shift accounts from the legacy system of former parent Lloyds Banking Group to a new setup operated by Banco Sabadell, who acquired TSB for £1.7 billion in March 2015 - less than two years after it had been floated off.

Almost two million people - more than a third of TSB's 5.2 million customers - experienced problems when making mobile and online payments as the result of a software failure, and the problems have still not been entirely resolved.

That was followed by a wave of claims of fraud from customers, some of whom watched hanging on the line to TSB's overloaded fraud department as their accounts were drained.

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