UK (Commonwealth) _ Hundreds of thousands of clients of Bank of Ireland are presently unable to use its mobile banking services. “At this time, our mobile banking is not accessible. We sincerely apologize to our customers for the inconvenience. This is a top priority for us, the Bank of Ireland tweeted.
The bank responded to a consumer by saying that physical card transactions are unaffected by the interruption. An error screen with the statement “No internet connection” greets users when they try to use the software. It suggests them to check their mobile data or Wi-Fi connection and try again.
The reason for the outage, which occurred a year after the Data Protection Commission penalized the bank €750,000 for ten Banking365 system breaches, has not been disclosed by Bank of Ireland.
Before that, the Central Bank of Ireland fined Bank of Ireland €463,000 in April 2022 for data breaches impacting more than 50,000 clients and €24.5 million in December 2021 for regulatory violations concerning its IT system and associated internal controls. After an outage lasting several hours while the bank worked to fix a technical issue, Bank of Ireland asserted late on Thursday afternoon that its mobile and online banking services had been restored.
A bank representative stated that there was a technical problem this afternoon that necessitated taking it offline while we resolved it. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that today’s consumers experienced. He had earlier stated that the bank’s point-of-sale systems, cards, and ATMs had all continued to function while online banking was unavailable.
In recent years, Bank of Ireland has had several IT issues and malfunctions. The worst happened in August of last year when its online and phone banking services were interrupted by technological problems. Customers may transfer up to €1,000 from their accounts even if they lacked the necessary money while the bank worked to fix the issue.
Social media users quickly spread the word about the system issues, which created previously unheard-of situations in certain places where long lines of people waiting to get money at ATMs forced gardaí to be dispatched. Customers who had a “unauthorized overdraft” on August 15th were later given the option to repay the money with no interest charged by the bank.
The “vast majority” had already paid back, according to the spokeswoman. The amount of money that consumers overdrew during the incident was not disclosed by the business. The bank said that its priorities “have been applied to assessing learnings from the outage and taking the required actions to reduce the risk of such outages recurring in the future” in its annual report for 2023.
For failing to have a sufficient system in place over the course of more than a decade to assure continuity of service to clients in the event of a severe IT interruption, Bank of Ireland received a penalty of €24.5 million by the Central Bank in late 2021. According to the Central Bank, the institution only started addressing flaws in its internal controls and IT service continuity structure in 2015. Still, 2019 was the completion year for this.
There were lengthy lines at ATMs and customer disruptions due to an outage that occurred at Bank of Ireland in August of last year. The bank declared in January that it will spend €60 million on 664 ATMs and branch upgrades.
One of the established Big Four Irish banks, Bank of Ireland Group plc (Irish: Banc na hÉireann) is a commercial bank that operates in Ireland. The bank holds a special place in Irish banking history being the country’s leading financial institution historically. The historic Governor and Company of the Bank of Ireland, which was founded by royal charter in 1783, forms the foundation of the current organization.
Since the implementation of European Banking Supervision in late 2014, the Bank of Ireland has been classified as a Significant Institution and is therefore under the direct supervision of the European Central Bank.
The Irish central bank has never been the Bank of Ireland. But in addition to being a commercial bank that accepted deposits and provided credit, it also carried out a number of central bank operations, much like the previously founded Bank of Scotland and Bank of England. Even the titles of the board of directors—the Governor, as chairman—and the board itself—the Court of Directors—allude to the position of a central bank.
