British bank HSBC Holdings PLC said it had successfully repelled a cyberattack on Friday, although clients trying to access their accounts suffered disruption.
“HSBC UK Internet banking was attacked this morning. We successfully defended our systems,” HSBC UK tweeted.
The bank has 17 million personal and business clients in Britain, but did not say how many were affected.
HSBC UK chief operating officer John Hackett said: “HSBC’s Internet and mobile services have partially recovered and we continue to work to restore a full service.”
The disruption came on payday for many Britons and just days ahead of today’s deadline for self-employed individuals to pay tax.
HSBC said it would waive fees incurred by clients as a result of the incident.
A spokesman identified it as a “denial of service attack,” which slows down or disables a network by flooding it with communication requests.
Users attempting to access the bank online were met with a message saying: “Sorry, there appears to be a system problem. Please try again later.”
Many clients took to Twitter to vent their frustration at the problems in accessing their accounts.
“I was planning to do something this weekend, but I have zero clue how much money I have to play with due to @HSBC_UK_Help online banking down,” Jeston Westmoreland wrote.
British banks have been hurt by a string of outages, some attributed to obsolete software and others to malicious activity by hackers, prompting lawmakers to call for more spending on technology and closer supervision of computer systems by board members.
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