Customers of two personal and business bank account providers were left unable to make use of their debit cards once more due to a recurring ‘service issue’ that has already occurred four separate times over the past few weeks, it was recently reported.
Both Yorkshire and Clydesdale Bank customers were up in arms over the chip and pin networks going down yet once more, with many flooding social networking websites such as Twitter to voice their displeasure. Many disgruntled customers vented their frustration at being unable to undertake everyday activities because of the debit cards not working, precluding them from making point of sale purchases or making cash withdrawals from ATMs – and leaving many too far from their nearest branch stranded without cash in hand.
National Bank of Australia, which owns both the Clydesdale and Yorkshire brands, announced that the issue was an intermittent one, and only affected a percentage of their customer base’s card transactions. The issue, according to a bank spokesman, was due to a hardware problem with First Data, one of the bank’s suppliers, and was currently under investigation in order to find a swift resolution to the problem.
While the bank did issue an apology for the inconvenience the outage had caused, it would not reveal the number of customers that were left without service, and neither did it indicate how many debit card customers it had overall. Both Yorkshire and Cyldesdale customers have grown increasingly dissatisfied with their debit card networks, as there have been service interruptions akin to this one several times, such as the debit card outage at the beginning of March that left them without the ability to use their debit cards not once but twice across the span of 72 hours.