Datacentre failure caused Barclays payday outage

Barclays Bank has said its ATM (Automated Teller Machine) network and counter terminals are back in operation after being out of use from 1.30pm to 6.30pm last Friday.

The five hours of system downtime - which coincided with many customers' monthly pay-day - were caused by a hardware failure at the company's Gloucester datacentre, according to a spokeswoman. Details of the glitch were not given.

In one week last August, the Gloucester data centre rendered ATMs useless on three days out of five when the bank reportedly had trouble installing database management software from IBM.

Power cuts at the facility have also led to ATM network failures on several occasions.

However, the Barclays spokeswoman stressed the latest problem was "identified very quickly", and that the fault only affected half company's ATMs, in the south of the UK. A datacentre in Wythenshawe, Greater Manchester, serves the north.