A catastrophic failure of the website for National Savings & Investments, the government’s savings accounts arm, has left 23 million savers out in the cold over the Premium Bond prize draw winners for January.
Customers with fixed rate bonds have had to resort to other sources in order to find out if they’ve received bounties for this month, and NS&I recently issued its apologies to the approximately one out of every three Brits who have more than £42billion in NS&I bonds. The lockout, which lasted from January 5 into the next day, also prevented customers from access to their online banking facilities as well.
The NS&I remarked that its website should be functioning properly now that they found and eliminated the problem. However, it also commented that it would be carefully monitoring the site over the next few days, as it was wary of any relapses.
NS&I was quick to say that the issue was not related in any way to the February 2011 issue that saw a chaotic mess ensue when some tax-free prizes were sent out to the wrong recipients due to a printing error. The savings provider insisted that such a grievous error would never happen again, as around 1.3 million Premium Bond awards faced delays of almost a month.
In excess of one million prize-winning Premium Bonds are selected at random every month, with one lucky winner being awarded a cool £1 million, while other prizes can range from as much as £100,000 to as little as £25.