The Minister for Finance has asked the Central Bank to look at whether further steps are needed to reduce the risk of outages affecting customers of Irish banks.

Michael McGrath’s call came after an outage that affected Bank of Ireland’s mobile-banking app and online banking service yesterday (15 August). The services are now back to normal.

The technical problem reportedly allowed some people to withdraw more money than they had in their accounts, as card and ATM services were not affected.

Bank of Ireland last night warned customers that, if customers had transferred or withdrawn amounts of money above their normal limits, this money would be debited from their accounts.

‘Dependence’ on technology

Minister McGrath said that he had asked the Central Bank to establish “a full account” of what happened, why it happened, and what will be done to avoid a repeat.

Officials from the Department of Finance have also been in contact with Bank of Ireland.

Referring to the “growing dependence” on technology for the delivery of financial services, the minister said that he had asked the officials to engage with the Central Bank on its assessment of the robustness of this Bank of Ireland incident, “and more broadly the robustness of the technology systems used by regulated, customer-facing, financial-service providers here in Ireland”.

“Financial-service providers have to do whatever is required to ensure continuity of service for their customers. This is vital for the normal functioning of our society and our economy,” Minister McGrath stated.