For a nation in the grip of a January sales epidemic it came as a most unwelcome antidote.

Yesterday, customers of HSBC, one of the country's largest high street banks, found that "technical glitches" had conspired to prevent them from spending on the final day of the holidays.

Shortly after midday, owners of HSBC's Switch/Maestro cards discovered they were unable to withdraw cash from ATMs, use their cards to pay for goods, or access their personal accounts via HSBC's online banking service.

There were also reports that some customers were unable to use their credit cards. "We've no specific information on what went wrong as yet," admitted a spokeswoman for HSBC. "We're trying to find out.We don't know as yet how many people have been affected. What we do know is that though it has been sporadic, it has been a nationwide problem affecting some ATMs and some point-of-sale transactions, though I can confirm it is nothing to do with the new chip and pin technology.

"We hope to resume services as soon as possible and obviously we apologise to all our customers."

HSBC was founded 140 years ago and is the world's third-largest financial services group, boasting a 14% share of the current account market in the UK.

At the end of last year it announced the first ever banking "January sale", bucking convention to open on the Christmas bank holiday to offer discounted mortgages, loans, insurance cover and credit cards.

The chaos produced by yesterday's technological gremlins came as a sharp reminder that we are now a nation increasingly besotted with plastic. Shortly before the new year, the Association for Payment Clearing Services confirmed that payments made by plastic had overtaken those made in cash for the first time in Britain.

There are more than 130m plastic cards in use in the UK - with debit cards accounting for 65% of card spending. Nine in 10 people own at least one credit or debit card.

Yesterday afternoon, disgruntled HSBC customers were sharing their tales of woe: "Just been to Tesco for groceries, and my HSBC Switch card was refused ...", noted one customer on the BBC website.

"I got home and tried to check my account online and got the try again later, so I phoned the internet banking number and heard from a rather tired-sounding woman that their entire system was down."

Guardian

-- Anonymous, January 04, 2005