back to article Barclays Online Offline again

Barclays Online banking has suffered its second weekday working-hours outage in a matter of days, offering only intermittent service for most of this morning according to Register readers and throwing a complete double-six at lunchtime today. "Live Help" folk on the Barclays site noted that: "We are aware that our online …

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  1. dogged
    FAIL

    On sodding pay day, too

    I'd really like to know when it's safe to go across to the ATM.

    Bastards.

  2. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    Hook, line and...

    I got an email from a hotmail account saying seomthing like: Make sure your Barclays account details are up to date, enter them here, etc. I forwarded it straight to Barclays, Hotmail and the police.

    I don't even have a Barclays account, and anybody who did would surely be competant enough to notice the line on the bottom of their bank statement that says something like: "we never email customers asking for their details".

    1. Will Godfrey Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: Hook, line and...

      I forwarded a similar scam to them a couple of years ago, taking care to preserve the full header - They didn't even bother to acknowledge the email :(

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hook, line and...

      I forwarded it straight to Barclays, Hotmail and the police.

      Wait, you actually forwarded a spam/scam email to the police? Have you just got your first computer or something? What a complete waste of police time spent processing your totally unecessary email.

      Please tell me you don't forward all your spam emails to the police??

  3. AndrueC Silver badge
    Thumb Down

    >quite nice when it's working, to be fair

    Would be even nicer without the stupid adverts.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Do they want to keep customers?

    That AJAX site is already flaky in secured copies of Firefox and Chrome.

    I detest having to use Internet Exploder for ANY site!

    I have to disagree with the author; bring back the old site; it was less flash, but at least it was reliable!

    If this cost me money or goes on much longer, I'll sack them.

    1. Matthew Collier
      Thumb Down

      Re: Do they want to keep customers?

      "That AJAX site is already flaky in secured copies of Firefox and Chrome."

      +1. I can't lower my security enough on Firefox to get their pile of steaming crappy AJAX heavy site working! (and nor should I have to).

      The old site worked fine, for years, on all the same computers I use at home and work, but now works on none (a lot of the problems when the site is "working", seem to revolve around the crappy response times from the analytics site they have outsourced to).

      I too have had to resort to the mobile site, and not use some of the functionality I used to have via the old, main, useable, working site.

      I lodged a complaint and got back a very poor, generic response which didn't really deal with any of the specifics of the complaint. I must follow that one up by letter.

      Bunch of arse, will probably look at dumping them after 22 years, once my mortgage with them is finished (current deal too good to dump/switch). Finding any bank not as crap, is the challenge though!

  5. JimmyPage Silver badge
    FAIL

    Barclays acheive heights of incompetence

    other banks can only dream of. Suffice is to say that in my 12 years of banking with them, they managed to cock up so badly, that the only way I could really really repay them was to keep my account open with < 90pence in it ... 15 years and counting now.

    Although nothing will make up for my Dad losing £5,000 by an employee just walking into the branch, saying he was the company director, and with no checks or ID emptying the account.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Barclays acheive heights of incompetence

      "Although nothing will make up for my Dad losing £5,000 by an employee just walking into the branch, saying he was the company director, and with no checks or ID emptying the account."

      Midland did a similar trick to me. It was a fair attempt at my signature but the address was wrong!

      I thought it was an inside job, but couldn't prove it.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Barclays acheive heights of incompetence

      "Suffice is to say that in my 12 years of banking with them, ... < 90pence in it ... 15 years and counting now."

      So you had an account with them containing < 90p for 3 years BEFORE you started banking with them?

  6. lizs

    "quite nice when it's working"....

    not for me - slow, clunky, less intuitive than the previous system - and it falls over at the end of every month pretty much.

    Our 'relationship manager' usually ignores me when i email him to say it's down again. Few weeks ago he said 'oh yeah i had 3 complaints today so it must have been down' like he doesn't believe me normally. The month end problem he put down to 'too many people accessing the system'. Oh i'm sorry - we really shouldn't expect an company such as Barclays to be able to cope with so many customers paying their suppliers and staff at month end.

    I would say their online banking is a joke - only it ain't funny - it's bloody frustrating. It's about time we could charge them for our wasted time each time it falls over.

  7. elamh
    FAIL

    The "new" barclays site is a really good example of how to get it wrong, (see also the new facebook, gmail etc), and I pretty much don't use them anymore because of the access difficulties. One thing I did find with Barclays,was that while the main online banking site is borked, the mobile equivalent is usually OK.

    YMMV!

  8. Teed-OFF
    FAIL

    Dung Award to Barclays

    Barclays Online Banking is OFF-Line AGAIN!!!

    I am a small business reliant on a daily basis both personal and business internet banking with Barclays.

    In this day of modern technology Barclays STILL cannot get it together!!!

    I pay to this bank every month a big fee to conduct my banking and services only to have to under duress put up with their lousy services. I really feel that I should take my banking accounts elsewhere...but where, they are all the same. Rubbish.

    I feel really frustrated and this is the reason for my post today.

    This week I have telephoned to ask why this keeps happening all the time with their internet banking. I have received no cooperation = No result.

    I have been into my bank branch only to be looked at with long blank faces by the staff seated at the front desks. their only recommendation for a solution was; referred myself to the manager who said and I Quote" Your computer must have a virus"???? - Un-Quote: I have attempted to log in to my Internet bank account using 3 different and separately located computers.

    The bad attitude and complete lack of customer care service from the staff is ROTTEN from the top right down to the bottom.

    I think that they are paying their Chief Executive too much money, if he were to take a smaller slice and re-invest that money into the banks so-called modern technology perphap's and just perhaps the services in this bank might improve slightly.

    So on this basis I am awarding Barclays FIRST Prize - A Pile of Elephant DUNG for their incompetence.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Dung Award to Barclays

      Try the Coop

  9. Nick Woodruffe
    FAIL

    I had a business account with them for a number of years about five years ago but switched after the usual terrible service. Every quarter I would be sent a letter telling me who my new business manager is.

    Well they were never in the local branch and if you rang the so called direct number, all you got was a call centre.

    With Natwest the business manager is still the same one. I can go in and say hello and grab a coffee in the branch and when required he has actually visited my office with paperwork that required a signature. I'm sticking with the more personal experience and an online banking system that works.

  10. Chris Evans
    FAIL

    Old Site

    The old site wasn't much more reliable but it was much more useable!

    Some things you used to be able to do are either impossible or much more awkward. Don't they test these sites with real usewrs before going live?

  11. Pahhh
    Stop

    Better than old site

    Reliabiltiy asside, the new site is way better than the old site.

    I do payrol for 9-10 people end of the month and with the new site has a much much better workflow.

    Just wished it was more reliable.....

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Still down

    17:37 BST, 25/5/12

    1. dogged

      Re: Still down

      Back up as of now.

  13. Will99

    I think they should off-shore their IT ...

    ...oh.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    What sort of gear?

    Come on, El Reg. At least tell us what sort of servers, storage, database, etc they are using so we can slam the people that fanboi that gear (even though it was almost certainly a human error).

  15. Anonymous Coward
    Joke

    Boy, it is getting to the point....

    where people are going to start to believe the big banks are not good at managing risk.

  16. Anon the mouse
    WTF?

    one up one down

    On-line seems to be back up and stable....for now.

    Mobile banking has been broken for a couple of days now.

  17. Arachnoid
    FAIL

    Even the Barclays payment authentication is having issues.It wouldnt authenticate my debit card payment for my Council Tax payment the other day and today it took two further attempts before it eventuially worked.

  18. Zot
    Flame

    Now Chrome says the login screen is not secure

    It shows a yellow triangle warning which means there's items that are 'insecure resources' are on the log-in page!

    And after a few refreshes it finally says it's secure - huh! What kind of flaky horror is this!?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Now Chrome says the login screen is not secure

      This is what can happen when you put a load balancer in front of a bunch of servers....and only update half of the servers.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bloody bankers

    It seems to be a trend of websites these days to make them all flashy and whizzy at the expense of making core functionality rubbish and frustrating to use.

    I dread logging onto the Barclays internet banking, it's so damned slow whichever browser or machine I use!

    The old one, whilst looking dated and primitive, actually did the job.

  20. Roger Stenning
    FAIL

    It's borked AGAIN, dammit :-(

    As title. You log in normally, and it bounces you back to the login screen with this little gem:

    "505 - You have not used the service for more than 5 minutes. Please enter your membership details below and click on the 'next' button to log in."

    And it's payday, at the start of the holiday weekend, of course. There better be heads rolling on this *mutter wibble scream*

  21. crankier
    Coat

    It's a good job it is not buried into our welfare management

    Down again this afternoon.

    Think it is time for a rethink - back to using shells and hurling rocks - at least it would be more entertaining

  22. Redcar1
    Thumb Down

    Absolute rubbish - looking for another business bank account.

    No statements the first time and then the site kicked me out.

    I've been trying to get into it all today and after 40 minutes on the phone the best they could manage was 'try again in a couple of hours'.

    You can't even complain - the website is down/won't let you.

    And I'll bet the 'Technical Specialist' closed the Incident as well.

    Garbage.

  23. Redcar1
    Thumb Down

    Absolute rubbish - looking for another business bank account.

    No statements the first time and then the site kicked me out.

    I've been trying to get into it all today and after 40 minutes on the phone the best they could manage was 'try again in a couple of hours'.

    You can't even complain - the website is down/won't let you.

    And I'll bet the 'Technical Specialist' closed the Incident as well.

    PS - I'm now a Mac user, but I guess Barclays isn't so I'll be looking for a new bank account tomorrow.

    Garbage.

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