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Outage? No, phones are playing silly buggers, insists Sainsbury's Bank

But customers believe days of problems go deeper than that

Updated Sainsbury's Bank has insisted to The Register that it is not experiencing an IT outage, despite lots of enraged customers asking why their money isn't moving.

Lots of irritated people, including Reg readers who got in touch with us, have been complaining that the orange-hued bank's performance has been less than stellar over the past week.

The bank told El Reg this morning that it had had some phone problems on Monday which caused some customers to experience delays getting through. It denied that problems like the ones angry customers tweeted about (above) had been caused by an IT meltdown, insisting that it had seen no transaction or payment problems on its backend systems.

On 17 June the bank tweeted that it was carrying out a system update. It insisted to us today that this was a telephone system update and was not related to its core systems.

We are awaiting Sainsbury's Bank's on-the-record statement addressing the cause of some customers' monies seemingly vanishing into the digital ether. At this stage it appears prudent to take the bank's own explanation with a pinch of salt.

Earlier this week fellow UK bank TSB was thrown under the bus by IT kit supplier IBM, which told the world that the bank's ongoing IT meltdowns could have been caused by lack of testing by TSB techies. ®

Updated to add

A spokesperson from Sainsbury’s Bank has been in touch to say:

We’re very sorry some of our credit card customers experienced delays getting through to us on the phone earlier this week. We’re still making updates to improve the way customers see their online transactions, in the meantime customers can view statements online or call us for their transaction history using our automated self-service option or speak to an advisor.

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