The U.K. bank Barclays PLC confirmed that customers were unable to gain access to their accounts and withdraw money for a time Saturday after cash machines went down during an outage.
Systems were hit at 9 a.m. Eastern time by a 20-minute blackout caused by a power outage. It is thought the problems were associated specifically with LINK, the system that connects the U.K.'s automated teller machine network.
A spokeswoman for Barclays said the bank became aware of the problem Saturday and that it "was swiftly resolved," and the bank apologized to customers for the inconvenience.
She said the company was still looking into the matter "as a matter of priority." Any further comment without proper understanding of what cause the problems "would be inappropriate," she said.
The bank was unable to say how many customers had been affected.
Some Barclays customers also reported having difficulty logging on to their Internet accounts, but it is not known if those issues are connected to the ATM problems.
At peak times LINK processes 1 million transactions every hour through its 63,000 machines, with U.K cash withdrawals from its machines exceeding 10 billion pounds ($15.5 billion) a month.
