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Citizens Bank dealing with issues regarding online services

Citizens Bank‘s customers have had intermittent difficulty accessing online and mobile Banking services since Thursday, bank officials said.

The bank‘s website has experienced temporary disruptions due to an unusually high volume of Internet traffic, similar to disruptions that recently have impacted other U.S. banks, Theresa M. McLaughlin, the bank‘s chief marketing and communications officer, said in a letter to bank customers.

The excessive internet traffic is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS), she said.

Customers may experience either slow response times or unavailability of online and mobile banking, McLaughlin said.

If customers incur any fees due to this disruption in service, they are asked to speak with a banker a local branch or to call 800-922-9999.

Earlier this month, a computer hacking group that claims responsibility for cyberattacks on PNC Bank vowed to continue trying to shut down American banking websites for at least the next six months.

The assault on PNC‘s website started in early December, but the Downtown-based bank appears to have been mostly successful in countering the attacks that try to cut access for online banking customers by overwhelming a website with traffic.

Citizens officials are not describing its current web site problems as a cyber attack. Yet, many of the bank‘s customers are posing that question on the bank‘s Facebook page.

This article was written by Channel 11’s news exchange partners at TribLIVE.