The online banking service for Citizens Bank is currently down, and the following message has been posted: 'We are sorry that Citizens Bank Online is not available at this time. Please be assured that we are taking every step to make online banking available as soon as possible. All current and future dated transactions will be processed as scheduled. Until online banking service is restored, you may wish to call our 24/7 PhoneBank for automated account information." The bank has yet to disclose the reason for this incident, and we can only hope that it has nothing to do with a hacker attack.

Citizens Bank customers who want to perform any online transactions, should refrain from doing so until the problem has been taken care of. If you only want to check the balance of your account, a telephone number has been provided for New England, New York, and Mid-Atlantic customers. A dedicated line has been set up for business customers as well.

Also, it would be a good idea to be careful with your security credentials at this time and not give away any private information about your bank account.

Serious questions about the reliability of cloud computing are starting to surface, especially since this comes so quickly after the Amazon S3 outage which occurred on Sunday, the 20th of July. The outage did not have a major impact, but it did affect a number of web 2.0 sites.

Earlier this week the bank had made public the fact that over the second quarter of 2008 it had lost $2.53 per share, which amounted to a total of $201.6 million. Over the same period in 2007, the bank made a profit of $9.6 million.

Bill Hartman, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Citizens Republic Bancorp Inc. commented at the time: "We are a much stronger institution today than we were a quarter ago. We want our clients in our community to know just how strong a bank Citizens is."