UK customers were left struggling to access mobile and online banking on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

HSBC’s online and mobile banking services have been restored after customers faced major disruption on Black Friday.

The bank said the issues began just after 8am on the busy shopping day due to an issue with its “internal systems”.

Services were back and up and running on Saturday morning, having started to return late on Friday.

HSBC apologised for the problems, saying in a statement on X it was “deeply frustrating for many of our customers”.

“We’re really sorry to those impacted and we’ll continue to monitor systems closely,” it added.

The bank posted regular updates online throughout Black Friday, but some complainants demanded compensation.

One wrote on X: “Surely some form of compensation would be issued here? Some people have had a nightmare day. ‘Sorry for the inconvenience caused’ doesn’t help much.”

HSBC said debit and credit cards had been working as normal during the disruption.

Customers advised to keep record of expenses

The outage happened as the Black Friday shopping bonanza, with retailers slashing their prices, got into full swing.

Some people may have wanted to access their banking to check how much cash they had left to spend in the sales.

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Sam Richardson, deputy editor of Which? Money, said: “We strongly advise customers that have been left out of pocket to keep evidence of extra expenses they may have incurred as a result of the outage, so they can be claimed back from HSBC.

“People want a bank they can depend on, and if IT outages become a regular occurrence, consumers could be tempted to vote with their feet and switch to an alternative provider – particularly with a lot of tempting switching incentives on offer at the moment.

“Having a back-up bank account or credit card can help, by giving consumers a way to make essential payments during outages like these.”