Northern Ireland customers did not act on Bank of Ireland glitch in same way as those in Republic of Ireland

Bank of Ireland has apologised after a technical issue affected a number of its services and led to large queues at the bank’s ATMs in parts of the Republic of Ireland last night as word spread on social media that people could withdraw cash despite not having funds in their accounts. An Garda Siochana said it was aware of an “unusual volume of activity” at some ATMs.

In Northern Ireland there are 13 branches of the Bank of Ireland, eight with external ATMs.

A spokesperson for the bank said that Northern Ireland customers were impacted by the technical issues, but the bank didn't have similar reports of people in Northern Ireland queueing to take money from cash machines.

Bank of Ireland said its app and and online services are working again this morning (Wednesday) and any transfers or withdrawals taken out during the outage will appear in their accounts during the day.

It has informed customers who withdrew more cash than was in their accounts that this would appear as an overdraft, and encouraged those who find themselves in financial difficulty as a result of the fault to get in touch.

A Bank of Ireland spokesperson, asked had there been activity at ATMs in Northern Ireland similar to what had happened in the Republic of Ireland, said: “Yesterday a technical issue impacted a number of Bank of Ireland’s services. Our teams restored these services overnight.

"Overnight payments to accounts will appear throughout the day and the app may be slow today as we continue to catch up in processing payments.

"All branches and contact centres are available to support customers with transactions also.

"The technical issue impacted Northern Ireland customers also, but we didn’t have similar reports of customers using Northern Ireland ATMs late last night.

"We sincerely apologise for the disruption this outage caused – we know we fell far below the standards our customers expect from us.”