Lloyds Bank Experiences Performance Issues for Over Two Days

Online banking has become a go-to tool for virtually every user these days. Everyone expects to be able to transfer money, pay bills, and manage their accounts on the go with ease. With online account accessibility becoming an industry-standard, it is crucial for banks to manage the performance of their online banking applications to provide the best customer experience to every user on any device.

Unfortunately, this was not the case for Lloyds Bank this week. For the past two days, Lloyds Bank customers have experienced significant issues when attempting to log in and check their balances, and an issue with this big of an impact doesn’t go unnoticed. A recent article states that Lloyds Bank “refused to cough details on the nature of the problem,” which left many customers in the dark as to what exactly was going on.

I decided to investigate to see if I could find any details on the problem—I looked at our web tests that were set up for http://www.lloydsbank.com over the last two-day period and noticed pockets of test failures:

Investigating the test data, all of the failures displayed are DNS failures when trying to connect to http://www.lloydsbank.com:

I decided to dig deeper to see what was causing the DNS failure. I created a DNS test for www.lloydbanks.com and noticed that the agent could not connect to one of their name servers, ns4.lloydstsb.com. This would explain why I was seeing DNS failures on the web test:

Dealing with frustrated customers is always difficult, but shouldn’t be avoided if the situation arises. You sometimes have to decide on how much information to provide clients while working on the issues at hand, especially when the issue is directly affecting a tool that most users access on a daily basis. Customer retention relies largely on how the situation is handled. Whether Lloyds bank truly did not know what is causing the errors on their online banking application, or if they do not want to tell their customers what is going on, is beside the point; clear, timely communication is key to protecting your brand and profits when dealing with performance issues.

By: Greg Rubin, Mitchell Zelmanovich, and David Lui