Yesterday it seems Barclays suffered a serious technical problem resulting in the loss of several critical services inluding ATM’s and Online Banking. What caught my eye about this was that well known Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis tweeted about the outage and used a specific hashtag, #BarclaysGlitch.
I'm hearing people struggling to get access to Barclays. Please share how it's going to #barclaysglitch
— Martin Lewis (@MartinSLewis) October 31, 2013
Martin has a healthy following of around 260 thousand followers and is very influential in the financial services world in the UK. A lot of people started to use the hashtag to talk about the outage. Barclays themselves then also used the hashtag which is what was really interesting (for me anyway).
We are aware of a technical issue, and we are working hard to put things right as soon as possible. #barclaysglitch
— Barclays UK News (@barclaysuknews) November 1, 2013
I think this was smart work by Barclays. I wonder if we will see journalists/influencers (ugh) looking to brand bank outages in the future? A race to have the hashtag most used in an outage? Will banks themselves try and add unique hashtags to outages? Does anyone normal use the word outage?
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