Outage at HSBC Mainframe Affects Customer Experience

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Global financial institution HSBC (www.hsbc.com) experienced downtime Friday afternoon after an outage at the company's mainframe occurred, according to a report by Datacenter Dynamics.

As a result of the outage, many HSBC customers had trouble accessing their bank accounts online, using ATMs or performing transactions using their debit cards for several hours on Friday afternoon.

"Just before 3 p.m. today HSBC in the UK experienced a mainframe outage that effected our online banking services, some of our ATMs and some debit card payments," wrote a HSBC representative in an update on its website. "We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers. We are prioritizing all payments in order to clear any backlog."

HSBC said the problem was resolved with all systems fully recovered at 4 p.m., adding that there had been no loss or compromise of customer data as a result of the outage.

The company's ATMs were back online by 4:45 p.m., while its systems supporting card terminals and online banking were operating by 4:50 p.m.

HSBC then announced at 6:20 p.m. via its Twitter feed that all transactions affected by the outage had been cleared and processed.

In May 2008, HSBC admitted to losing a server containing transaction data on 159,000 account holders containing account numbers, customer names, transaction amounts and transaction types, from its Hong Kong branch office.

HSBC has some 7,500 offices in 87 countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Middle East and Africa, along with listings on the London, Hong Kong, New York, Paris and Bermuda stock exchanges, serving a total of about 95 million customers.

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