Friday the 13th strikes for Barclays' corporate customers

Superstitions stoked by blackout of iPortal centralized platform when no maintenance was scheduled

Barclays Bank is wrestling with some digital gremlins affecting its corporate banking services this Friday the 13th of June – the final day of the working week for many of us, but perhaps not the poor techies beavering away to restore normal play.

According to online outage overseer Down Detector, reports of wobbly web services began to flood in just before 8am UTC, though fewer customers are now complaining.

That said, Barclays admitted its iPortal and Barclays.Net are still out of action, meaning it is definitely an unlucky time – for some at least – to be a Barclays customer.

"We're sorry if you're having problems viewing balances, transactions, and reports in Barclays.Net right now – we're urgently working to fix it," the bank's status page says.

The iPortal is a centralized platform that lets customers access a multitude of Barclays Corporate Banking digital services, such as Barclays.Net for payments, reporting, and other transactions that are accessed via a single login.

A customer and Reg reader told us this morning that the bank had "evaporated all online accounts – always good fun when pay runs are done today and suppliers expect, I don't know, being paid."

"Must have taken an early weekend, or worse, pushed an update on a Friday!! The BOFH will no doubt eye roll this one," they added.

According to Barclays, it undertook planned maintenance on June 1 and 7 but had not listed any work scheduled for today. Techies know better than to tempt fate by risking prolonged downtime on Friday the 13th. As for their bosses or bosses' bosses, well, that's another matter.

We've asked the bank what's caused the online borkage. ®