HSBC Hit By Cyberattack

HSBC customers are experiencing yet another outage, but this time it’s due to a cyberattack.

The bank, which has experienced recent outages and service issues due to technical glitches, announced Friday (Jan. 29) that it is working with law enforcement to identify the hacker(s) who caused its personal banking sites in the U.K. to crash.

The latest takedown was the second outage the bank has seen this month, Reuters confirmed.

“HSBC’s Internet and mobile services have partially recovered, and we continue to work to restore a full service,” John Hackett, HSBC U.K. Chief Operating Officer, said in a statement.

“We are closely monitoring the situation with the authorities,” Hackett added.

Europe’s second largest lender claimed that it had successfully thwarted an initial distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack but was eventually overcome by additional threats, which delayed its ability to fully restore its services.

“Bank IT systems just don’t seem to be up to the job,” Andrew Tyrie, Conservative lawmaker and chairman of the Treasury Committee, explained in a statement seen by Reuters. “It could be leaving the banking system, and with it the economy, exposed to the risk of systemic failures.”

In a statement seen by Reuters, Andrew Tyrie, Conservative lawmaker and chairman of the Treasury Committee, said, “bank IT systems just don’t seem to be up to the job.”

“It could be leaving the banking system, and with it the economy, exposed to the risk of systemic failures,” Tyrie stated. 

HSBC customers received a big apology from the bank back on Jan. 5 after the bank’s online personal banking service was knocked offline for a second day by technical issues.

In a statement referencing that specific outage, Hackett said: “Our customers continue to have issues with HSBC online and mobile banking. We profoundly apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. We will ensure customers do not lose out as a result of this issue. Any fees customers incur as a result of this outage will be waived.”

He went on to say that the company’s Internet banking system was dealing with a “complex technical issue,” and that the outage was in no way caused by a cyberattack or malicious act.

Unfortunately for HSBC customers, these instances were just the latest impacts they had to deal with due to technical glitches causing problems for the bank’s services.

Last year, business customers of Europe’s largest bank were in uproar when a technology issue disrupted thousands of payment transactions.