HSBC system outage hits online, telephone and ATM banking

HSBC customers have taken to Twitter to vent their frustration after the bank's online and telephone banking services went down on Friday.

The bank tweeted from its @hsbc_uk_press account at around 16.00 that its "systems" were experiencing problems.

"Sorry - we are having issues with our systems. Working to fix it ASAP. When we have an update, will tweet it from here," read the most recent statement.

V3 tried to log-in to an HSBC account and was greeted with an error message asking customers to "try again later".

Telephone banking also appears to be affected, no doubt because it uses the same back-end systems, with a recorded message greeting callers. There are also reports that some of the bank's ATMs are affected.

HSBC customers took to Twitter to complain about the downtime.

"Thank you #HSBC for your system failure which resulted in my card decline after getting my eyebrows done. Showed me right up," wrote @0zelsays.

"Irritated as I am not to be able to withdraw cash, I wonder how #HSBC's press team are feeling at 4pm on a Friday," added @lizlarvin.

This not the first time HSBC's systems have experienced problems. Online banking and ATM issues left customers in a similar position early in 2010, when the bank blamed a problem with its mainframe.

UPDATED: HSBC said it had restored service as of 17.00. A quick check online proves this to be the case.