Attempts to access the website www.egg.com are leading to search engine result pages rather than the bank itself.

The company blamed its service provider for the outage but was optimistic that the problem would be solved soon.

An Egg spokeswoman told Web User at 1415 this afternoon that it was "hoping to have some services back up within the hour", but intimated that the problem was with Cable and Wireless.

"Cable and Wireless, our service provider, are obviously having some difficulties with their network at the moment," she said.

The spokeswoman added that it wasn't just Egg that had been affected, and several other companies were experiencing difficulties with their websites at the moment because of the same problem.

She added that customers would still be able to get through to Egg on the telephone.

However, the inconvenience of the website being down was likely to upset customers, according to one analyst.

Martin Stern, head of market research firm Keynote UK said: "It is imperative that a company whose total business model is based on online presence manages to maintain consistent website performance. It's not like Egg are simply looking after people's holidays, or travel, in their own words this is 'Your Money' - which in this day and age customers expect to access 24 hours a day.

"Given the much-lower operating costs of a branch-free model, their margins should be able to fund the building of a world-class online infrastructure," said Stern.

Recent research found online banking services are often more difficult to use than telephone offerings.

UPDATE 1645: The Egg website appears to be accessible again.

www.egg.com

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