LONDON - Thousands of HSBC customers in Britain were unable to access online banking services on Friday, as the bank acknowledged an outage affecting some users of its website and banking app.

"We’re really sorry that some customers are having issues accessing personal online and mobile banking," the lender said on social media platform X, without giving a reason for the outage.

More than 7,000 customers had complained of problems as of 0846 GMT, according to website DownDetector which tracks such outages.

Customers reported being unable to access their money and pay bills, according to posts on X.

Disruption of online banking services has been a persistent problem for banks in Britain in recent years, and an acute one because lenders have increasingly encouraged customers to bank online to reduce fixed costs such as bank branches.

(Reporting By Lawrence White Editing by Tomasz Janowski)