A technical fault with the Bank of Ireland’s online portal and mobile app that allowed customers with little or no money in their accounts to transfer funds and withdraw them from cash points led to long queues at some ATM machines across Ireland, reports said Wednesday.
Police officers were deployed to cash machines after the IT glitch, Ireland’s National Public Service Media (RTE) reported.
Large queues formed at ATMs across the country as word of the glitch spread on social media, with people hoping to receive “free money.”
“We sincerely apologize for the disruption this outage caused — we know it fell far below the standards our customers expect from us,” the Bank of Ireland said on X, formerly known as Twitter.
A spokesperson for Ireland’s national police said the deployment of police at ATMs was carried out on a “case-by-case basis” and that “local decisions were made depending on the public safety and public order.”
The technical issue has reportedly also affected customers in Northern Ireland.
Later, the Bank of Ireland announced that the problem, which disrupted its online banking portal 365 online as well as its mobile banking app, had been resolved as of 8 a.m. local time (0700GMT).