Bank of Ireland said it had finally resolved issues around its online banking services late on Friday, ending an outage that had lasted most of the day.
The lender will open more than 90 of its branches on Saturday and beef up its phone customer service staffing to handle issues arising from the outage, Bank of Ireland said in an emailed statement.
“These services are now returning to normal,” it added.
Earlier, the bank extended its opening hours on Friday and said it was “extremely sorry” as it worked to fix the issue that brought down its mobile app and part of its website on what is a key day companies as it is the last day of the business quarter.
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Many disgruntled clients took to social media to criticise the lender.
“We are extremely sorry that Banking 365 and mobile banking services were not available today, and deeply regret the inconvenience to our customers,” the lender said.
“All other Bank of Ireland services are operating normally including our ATMs, debit and credit cards, and Business Online.,” it had said earlier. “We apologise again for this inconvenience.”
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A previous statement on Friday morning said the bank was “experiencing difficulties” and that it was “working to fix this issue as quickly as possible”.
A number of the bank’s customers took to social media to express frustration at the issue, and also complain about the bank’s communication strategy.
“To be fair, it’s not cool to turn the replies off for this tweet,” said one in response to the bank’s admission of the problem on Twitter. The Bank of Ireland app has been down all morning and I expect on the last Friday of the month many customers are trying to log in and make transactions.”
It’s a good job that Bank of Ireland are better at taking interest charges from us all than they are at putting together a banking app that actually fekkin’ works 😡 #BankOfIreland
— Steve Kinsey (@YorkshireDublin) June 30, 2023
Another wrote: “Absolute amateurs. Been trying to log on for nearly three hours now. Imagine you’re a client with bills to pay, urgent monies to transfer out, and you cannot access your account because Bank of Ireland cannot run a stable or modern banking platform.”
A third asked: “Any information on the issue with everything related to BOI today? Can’t access the app, either on mobile or laptop. Can’t make any payments with my account online either. What’s going on?”
A fourth person said Bank of Ireland “could do a lot better on their poor communication of outages”, adding: “Last working day of the month and quarter, far from ideal.”
