HSBC’s Hong Kong mobile apps were down on Monday, with the banking giant saying they are experiencing technical issues.

Customers were initially shown an error message when opening banking apps stating that “access is restricted until we have your valid email address and mobile number.” By lunchtime, it was replaced with a message saying that the fault was temporary and that work was underway to restore services.

The city’s largest lender has seven million customers in the city.

It is the second outage this year. In January, HSBC online services and banking apps were down for several hours.

Earlier this year, HSBC made a full HK$14 billion acquisition of its subsidiary Hang Seng Bank. Local media reported that Hang Seng apps were also down on Monday morning.

An HSBC spokesperson told HKFP via email: “All our services returned to normal before 2:00 pm today. We again apologise for any inconvenience caused.”