Barclays Customers Stranded At Checkout After Technical Glitch

Barclays customers have been unable to access money after a technical fault meant that all banking services were out of reach and consumers were left red-faced at the front of shop queues.

The bank confirmed the glitch via its Twitter account and it affects the ability for customers to withdraw money from cash machines, use debit and credit cards, and access online banking services.

“We're aware of an issue that is currently affecting some customers when attempting to make card transactions and withdrawals,” read a Tweet from Barclays. “We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”

Customers are understandably angry at the situation with a litany of complaints left on the website of Down Detector that have included being stranded in retail outlets.

“I have a meal out for a friends bday planned for tonight & can't withdraw money! Just got declined in pets at home for 11 pound with a big queue! Very embarrassing!” stated one commenter.

It’s unknown so far what has caused the outage and Ian Chidgey, VP of EMEA at Delphix, speculates that insufficient testing of databases at financial institutions has been the cause before and could well be again.

“Often the cause is insufficient testing. The databases in financial institutions are large and often more complex than in other companies. IT departments provide copies of databases for testing, but by the time a copy is available, the data itself is often old,” he stated. “In our data intensive world, data can be obsolete after only a couple of hours, but when refreshing just a single testing data set can takes days, the data will never be up to date enough for risk free testing.”

Barclays’ latest issue follows large scale problems at the end of February that meant RBS, Barclays, Natwest and Santander banking apps all crashed on or around pay day to send Twitter into a frenzy as confidence in the banking sector continues to plummet.