Barclays online and telephone banking suffers prolonged outage

Some customers have reported a loss of funds from their accounts

Online and telephone banking services at Barclays have been hit by a prolonged outage with customers unable to access their accounts.

The disruption began on Thursday morning and is still ongoing, according to the bank's website. It has been blamed on as-yet-unspecified "technical problems".

"We're sorry if you're unable to access Online Banking, Telephone Banking, or use some parts of our app. You can still check your balance and use most features in the app. Our teams are working to fix the problem and we'll keep you updated via @BarclaysUKHelp on Twitter, or you can search ‘Barclays service status' in your web browser," Barclays says.

The firm's telephone banking service has also been affected. A notice on Barclays' service status page says: "We're sorry, you won't be able to speak to us right now - we're working to fix a problem with this service. Our Barclaycard Telephone Banking team are working as they should be."

Barclays claims its mobile app is working as normal, telling customers on Twitter that they "can still make payments and check your balance in our Mobile Banking app as normal", but there have also been reports of transactions failing to go through.

Some Barclays customers are even reporting that funds are missing from their accounts.

One customer, Paul Girling, told the BBC: "A significant payment due into my account has gone missing. It has been confirmed as sent but not received."

Another customer took to Twitter to complain that the downtime had caused them to lose £4,600.

Barclays will be hoping the latest problems are not an echo of the recent troubles at another bank, TSB, which saw 1,300 customers lose funds as a result of a long-running systems failure and subsequent hacking, and the eventual resignation of its CEO.

Update: as of 17:30 on September 20, Barclays' website claimed online and mobile banking was 'back up and running', while telephone banking faced delays due to high call volumes.