HSBC website down after online attack cripples services

Banking giant HSBC says it has been fighting a distributed denial-of-service attack against its systems this morning, preventing users from accessing their online accounts.

The bank tweeted: “HSBC UK internet banking was attacked this morning”.

‘HSBC has successfully defended against the attack, and customer transactions were not affected. We are working hard to restore services, and normal service is now being resumed. The bank has indicated that it will be “working closely with law enforcement authorities to pursue the criminals responsible”.

Some customers are still unable to access accounts, the bank said.

Customers are being told to use the bank’s automated telephone banking service.

Today is the final Friday of the month – payday for many people in the country – and just two days before the January 31 deadline for submitting tax return forms to HMRC.

HSBC’s website was displaying an error message, saying: “Sorry, there appears to be a system problem”.

HSBC said that it has fixed the problem and beaten off the attackers with some success.

Another said: “So #HSBC online banking is down… again!”

The latest outage comes at an unfortunate time for the bank, just days after United Kingdom parliamentarians criticised the UK’s biggest banks for a string of IT glitches over the past year.

The analysts also said that customers should continue to be “vigilant” and follow best practices when it came to not sharing passwords or other information with anyone else. So it still looks like you can not do any online banking, please do let us know if this is the case.

DDoS attacks flood computer networks and are typically used to knock systems offline to allow hackers entry in order to steal data.