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Lloyds Bank customers still flogging the online dead horse

Banker's PR: Normal service levels resuming... whether that continues, we DON'T KNOW

Day two and old nag Lloyds Banking Group’s online and mobile app services are still up and down like the Grand National, with no sign that customers will be put out of their misery any time soon.

lloyds

An outage yesterday morning prevented punters from logging onto their accounts, to, say, apply for a loan or perhaps re-examine the damage caused by the financial blow-up over Chrimbo.

Lloyds, which claimed things were back up and running around lunchtime yesterday, refused to cough details on the nature of the problem and wouldn’t do so “even if” it knew the reason. But Reg readers told us access was patchy into the afternoon and again this morning.

A mouthpiece at Lloyds confirmed today, “we are still experiencing some intermittent issues”. He said, “We are still investigating, I don’t want to speculate on what the cause is.”

Customers were advised to try logging on, and if it didn’t work on that occasion, then to try again. No really. This was the advice handed down by Lloyds PR department.

“Service levels are returning to normal,” the spokesman said. “Whether things continue to happen, we don’t know.”

Reassuring. Outages will happen but companies can at least extinguish some customer service fires by managing the situation transparently.

We asked Lloyds if it was more important than ever, given the branch closure programme that saw 200 local banking outlets closed, that online services work. El Reg is waiting for a response.

We asked if the cost-cutting in 2016 with 640 IT and back office staff stuffed into the redundancy meat grinder had impacted the bank's ability to recover from IT screwups. We are awaiting a response.

In the absence of any explanation about the outages from Lloyds, Reg readers have been speculating away, suggesting everything from a simple DNS outage through to a borked software update.

The service is back up as the time of publication, so we suggest Lloyds customers jump online while the going is good. ®

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