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British bank TSB says it will fix days-long transaction troubles tonight

Totally Sucks, Buddy: Debit payments held up since April, online and app still wobbly, say readers

TSB admitted today it still hadn't fixed a transaction processing issue that has for days held up customers' payments, with users continuing to have issues at the time of publication.

We're told the transaction hold-up, which the Edinburgh-based bank said was linked to debit accounts, would be resolved "overnight." It did claim to have fixed a "temperamental" technical fault preventing some customers from accessing their online accounts, however.

Reg readers who double up as customers of TSB – once known as the comedy bank because of the frequency at which its web-based services fell over – maintained they were still having troubles logging onto the app or website, with some having experienced issues for days.

The website was telling punters: "Unfortunately we can't retrieve some of the account information you've requested right now. Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you. Please try later."

The app displayed the same message, "Sorry, we can't access your accounts at the moment. Please try later."

A quick hop onto the anger echo chamber that is Twitter shows a flood of complaints from customers about the problem dating back to 27 April.

The service wobbles continued into 28 April and have persisted ever since.

This transaction could not be processed

In addition to sporadic problems with getting into their accounts, customers told us that transactions made at the end of April have still not cleared.

"TSB users, including myself, have got a lot of pending transactions where we've used the debit card but they are yet to actually be debited from the account," said one Reg reader.

"I have 21 pending debt card transactions from the Bank Holiday weekend! Waiting on two refunds as well which have gotten caught up in the debacle…I wonder will it beat the 2018 outage?"

Our reader isn't alone.

Similar complaints were lodged on outage spotting site isitdownrightnow.com, with one user grousing: "All payments I've made in the last week are still in my account pending. Rent, council tax are now late being paid. What's going on TSB.. it's a joke now."

A quick reset and Bob's your unc... nope, That's not working!

The bank told us: "Our credit card customers had intermittent issues during the week which are resolved. For any customers that are experiencing issues they need to restart the app or reset their credentials. We're asking customers to contact us so we can help them."

A Reg reader opined of this advice: "The [TSB] Twitter people [are] playing by the scripts wasting users' time by telling them to delete the app and re-install when it's clearly a server issue!"

Other users were equally unconvinced.

TSB said of the processing issue: "On debit cards, that's related to some pending transactions which have taken longer to clear and will be resolved overnight. It hasn't impacted use of debit cards or available balances in accounts."

The bank did not clarify whether it would be compensating people who were penalised for late payments. It is 7th of May today.

The backdrop to the latest wobbles at TSB is that the bank is closing 120 branches, which, in combination with COVID restrictions, means that online services have become even more important. The company should be aware of the negative publicity that outages can generate, with the problems of 2018 having caused the previous CEO to lose his job and cost the bank £200m. ®

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