BANK of Ireland has confirmed its northern customers were impacted by a glitch that led to people withdrawing or transferring more money than was in their accounts on Tuesday night.
But the lender said it did not see the same queues at its northern ATMs that built up across the Republic last night after messages appeared on social media claiming people could withdraw cash despite not having funds in their accounts.
Bank of Ireland apologised for the glitch and said customers who withdrew more cash than was in their accounts have been informed that this would appear as an overdraft, and encouraged those who find themselves in financial difficulty as a result of the fault to get in touch.
The bank said this was down to a technical issue with its services and not a cyberattack.
The lender said its app and online services are working again on Wednesday and any transfers or withdrawals taken out during the outage will appear in their accounts during the day.
It comes after large queues built up at the bank's ATMs in parts of the Republic on Tuesday following viral messages were spread across social media.
An Garda Siochana said it was aware of an "unusual volume of activity" at some ATMs across the country.
Read more:
- North lost 27 per cent of total bank branch network in three years
- More people feel 'negatively impacted' by bank branch closures
In a statement on Wednesday, the bank said: “Yesterday a technical issue impacted a number of Bank of Ireland’s services.
“Our teams restored these services overnight and all services are available to customers this morning.
“Overnight payments to accounts may appear throughout the day.
“The technical issue impacted Northern Ireland customers also, but we didn’t have similar reports of customers using Northern Ireland ATMs late last night.
“We sincerely apologise for the disruption caused – we know we fell far below the standards our customers expect from us.”
Bank of Ireland was fined €24.5 million (£21m) in 2021 by the Central Bank of Ireland over failures to have a robust framework to ensure continuity of services in the event of a significant IT disruption.
Asked about the outage on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Irish Central Bank said it "continues to monitor the situation regarding the availability of certain services provided by Bank of Ireland".
"We are engaging with Bank of Ireland to ensure that any issues and errors identified are resolved for customers, and that it is doing all it can to ensure customers' expectation of a high-quality, uninterrupted service is met.
"Customers should contact Bank of Ireland in the first instance if they have concerns about their service.”
