Bank of America suffers outage

Bank of America's online banking system went offline yesterday, the second such incident this year, reports CNN Money.

In January, the bank experienced a similar problem, caused by an IT glitch. The outage is ill-timed, hitting on the first of the month - a day when many customers are scrambling to pay bills.

Customers attempting to access the bank's online services were experiencing "intermittent service disruptions", according to Tara Burke, a spokeswoman for the bank.

Ofcom is seeking to stop Internet service providers in the UK from promising unrealistic broadband speeds, states the BBC.

Ofcom's latest research found that just 14% of UK customers with up to 20Mbps services received speeds of over 12Mbps, while 58% averaged speeds of 6Mbps or less.

"There is a substantial gap between advertised speeds and the actual speeds people get in their homes," says Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards.

The UK's first Internet bank, Egg, has been split, with current owner Citigroup selling off its credit card business to Barclaycard for an undisclosed sum, reveals Computing.co.uk.

It is expected that the deal should be finalised by May, with all of Egg's remaining 1.15 million credit card customers getting a new Barclaycard later this year.

Egg was first established by insurance group Prudential in 1998, quickly gaining two million customers. But in the wake of the dot-com collapse, and following a disastrous foray into the French market, Egg was sold to Citigroup in 2007, for £575 million.

Customs agents have seized a shipment of tens of thousands of PlayStation 3 (PS3) game consoles, as part of a patent battle between Sony and LG, says The Telegraph.

The row is centred on PS3's Blu-Ray disc drive, which LG alleges infringes its intellectual property.

LG obtained a preliminary injunction at the civil court of justice, which is expected to limit supplies of new PS3 consoles in Europe within two to three weeks, once current stock is sold.