Abbey's business banking systems have taken an extra long weekend and been completely unavailable since yesterday, leaving customers unable to fulfil critical payments ahead of the spring bank holiday.

The bank's systems suffered a less severe technical problem (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/23/abbey_banking_outage/) earlier in the week, which affected only moving money via online banking. It had appeared resolved, but since at least Thursday evening all business customer functions have frozen.

Call centre staff were telling irate callers last night that the shutdown would be resolved in "about an hour". We were given the same timeframe on Friday lunch time, along with an apology, and told that "systems are updating".

Despite the assurances, as at 1.30pm Friday, customers were unable to make online payments, withdraw cash, or service their accounts through call centres.

One customer who contacted us described the length and timing of the unscheduled outage as "scandalous".

We are waiting for a comment from Abbey. ®

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