Lloyds Banking Group experienced a significant disruption to its app and online banking services on Thursday, affecting thousands of customers attempting to access their accounts. The bank acknowledged the issue and issued an apology as service outages persisted for several hours before being restored by Thursday evening.

The incident marked another setback for Lloyds, following a major IT failure earlier this year that impacted nearly half a million users. According to data from the service monitoring platform Downdetector, reports of problems surged sharply during the afternoon, indicating widespread difficulties across the bank’s digital channels.

Lloyds has not disclosed the specific cause of the recent outage but confirmed that its technical teams worked to resolve the problem promptly. Customers were advised to use alternative banking methods while the services were unavailable.

The bank’s repeated digital disruptions underscore ongoing challenges in maintaining the reliability of online financial services amid increasing customer demand. Lloyds has pledged to review its systems to prevent similar issues in the future and to improve the overall user experience for its customers.