Santander down: Online banking customers unable to access website

No explanation has yet been given for the cause of the issue

(Credit: Pablo Blazquez Dominguez/Getty Images)

Santander customers have been struggling to open their online bank accounts.

"We are currently experiencing issues with customers logging in to Online Banking", its UK support account tweeted.

Our team are working hard to resolve this as soon as possible. If you do need to log in, please try again later."

“Debit cards, credit cards and ATMs are not affected and customers can continue to use these as normal. Our telephone lines are operational but we are experiencing extremely high volumes of calls, so we would ask that customers with non-urgent transactions call later if possible”, the bank told The Independent.

According to Twitter users responding to Santander's statement, both personal and business accounts were affected.

Downdetector indicates that the issues began for thousands of users across the UK at around 10:00am, with issues continuing throughout the day.

The greatest numbers of customers affected were in London, Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow.

Santander has since said that the issue has been fixed.

“We’re sorry for the difficulties customers experienced earlier today accessing our digital banking services. The issues have now been fixed and our services are now working correctly.”

It did not comment on the cause of the outage.