Lloyds, Halifax Hit By Fund Transfer Outage In UK

Lloyds Banking Group was hit by a computer outage that left customers unable to conduct fund transfers for several hours, according to officials. The outage impacted hundreds of customers of Lloyds and Halifax, which both operate under Lloyds Banking umbrella.

The outage was connected to the U.K.’s Faster Payments service, and led to outages that lasted for about three hours, starting at 11:00 a.m. local time. Faster Payments had been experiencing intermittent disruptions dating back to earlier this month. The service allows customers to transfer funds to other consumers of participating banks.

A spokesperson for Faster Payments told PYMNTS that the central system is operating normally, but said they were aware that Lloyds Banking Group had been experiencing technical issues connected to the Faster Payments service. He also said that anyone experiencing issues should contact their bank or building society. The service is used for telephone, internet, mobile and standing order payments, he added.

The Faster Payments service previously experienced a disruption on July 8, which the company said was due to intermittent issues with its central infrastructure. The company said it was working with its infrastructure provider to conduct a full investigation.

Faster Payments issued an update on July 12 stating that most of the delayed payments had been processed, and also apologized to affected customers.

Financial Times reported that Mastercard, which powers the Faster Payments system through its Vocalink unit, had experienced a separate outage last week. Rival Visa had also reported a glitch that affected millions of debit and credit transactions last month.

The U.K.’s new payment system operator had only recently taken control over the Faster Payments system at the time of the outage, officials said.

The London Stock Exchange experienced a major outage in June, one of the worst incidents in seven years, according to the report.

Officials from Lloyds were not immediately available for comment.