The UK's TSB has rounded off a thoroughly miserable year by locking out two million customers from its online banking service for four hours on Wednesday morning after a maintenance over-run.
Maintenance work was due to finish at 06:00 on Wednesday morning, but online banking remained dark until after 10:00.
TSB issued the latest in a long list of apologies to frustrated customers over the latest cock up: "Online banking is now available and customers have been able to use the mobile app as normal this morning. We're really sorry the planned maintenance overnight for our online banking took a little longer than expected, and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused."
It's been an annus horribilis for TSB, which has suffered a series of IT failures over the course of the past year after a badly botched upgrade to a new banking system from Spanish parent Banco Sabadell locked customer out of online and mobile services for a couple of weeks in April. Further glitches and unscheduled downtime continued through July and September as the bank struggled to get its services back on track.
The fiasco cost CEO Paul Pester his job and led to a whacking £107.4 million first half loss.
For the first six months, TSB recognised additional post-migration costs, including customer compensation, additional resources and foregone income as a result of waived overdraft fees and interest charges, of £176.4 million.
The bank, which had to bring in a team from firefighters of IBM to help rectify its systems, says it recruited over 1,800 people and redeployed a further 700 staff into customer-facing roles to support customers who felt badly let down by poor communications and service levels in the immediate aftermath of the migration.