Many customers of the global banking and financial-services firm HSBC had a hard time banking online, using ATMs or paying with their debit cards in stores for several hours on Friday afternoon (UK time) as a result of what the company said was a mainframe outage.

“Just before 3 p.m. today HSBC in the UK experienced a mainframe outage that effected our online banking services, some of our ATMs and some debit card payments,” HSBC representatives wrote in an update posted on the company's website.

“We are very sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused our customers. We are prioritizing all payments in order to clear any backlog.” HSBC said the problem was resolved at 4 p.m., at which time systems began to recover.

No customer data was affected as a result of the outage, the company said. About four years ago, a former HSBC IT employee allegedly stole account information of about 15,000 clients with active accounts at the bank's Geneva-based branch.

ATMs were back on by 4:45 p.m., and systems supporting card terminals and online banking were running by 4:50 p.m. In a Twitter update around 6:20 p.m., HSBC said all payments impacted by the outage had been cleared and processed. London-based HSBC has about 7,500 offices in 87 countries in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the Americas, Middle East and Africa.

It has listings on the London, Hong Kong, New York, Paris and Bermuda stock exchanges. The company's businesses serve about 95m customers.