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Bank of Ireland online and mobile banking restored after outage

Bank apologises for inconvenience over latest glitch to hit its ebanking services

Bank of Ireland customers were unable to access their online and mobile platforms at Bank of Ireland on Thursday. Photograph: Alan Betson

Joe Brennan
Thu Apr 4 2024 - 13:37

Bank of Ireland said late on Thursday afternoon that its online and mobile banking services had been restored after an hours-long outage as the bank sought to resolve a technical glitch.

“There was a technical issue this afternoon which required us to take it offline while we fixed the problem,” a spokesman for the bank said. “We are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our customers today.”

The bank’s ATMs, cards and point-of-sale devices had continued to work while online banking was down, he had said earlier.

Bank of Ireland has had a number of IT problems and glitches in recent years. The most serious occurred last August when technical issues affected its phone and online banking services.

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As the bank looked to resolve the glitch at the time, customers were able to transfer up to €1,000 from their account even if they did not have the funds.

Word of the system problems spread like wildfire on social media and led to unprecedented scenes in some areas, with gardaí deployed to ATMs as lengthy queues of people seeking to access funds built up. The bank subsequently gave customers who went into an “unauthorised overdraft” on August 15th time to pay the money back without an interest charge.

The spokesman said the “vast majority” had already repaid. The company did not disclose how much money was overdrawn by customers during the episode.

The bank said in its 2023 annual report that its focus “has been applied to assessing learnings from the outage and taking the actions required to reduce the risk of such outages recurring in the future”.

Bank of Ireland was fined €24.5 million by the Central Bank in late 2021 for failing over the course of more than a decade to have an adequate system in place to ensure continuity of service to customers in the event of a serious IT disruption.

The Central Bank said the lender took initial steps only in 2015 to address deficiencies in both its IT service continuity framework and associated internal controls. However, this was not completed until 2019.

Joe Brennan

Joe Brennan

Joe Brennan is Markets Correspondent of The Irish Times

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