Savers seeking to withdraw money from Icesave, an arm of Landsbanki, the Icelandic bank, today found they could not operate their accounts online.

A message on the Icesave website said: “We have been experiencing intermittent faults with our website over the last 12 hours. These were intermittent faults randomly affecting different groups of customers at random intervals. Our IT team has now resolved the issue.”

But Times readers said this morning that the website was allowing them to look at their accounts but not to take money out.

The glitches with the Icesave site follow a dramatic week in which the Icelandic Government has nationalised Glitnir, one of its largest banks, and has sought financial help from the US and from Scandinavian countries to prop up its economy.

A spokeswoman for Icesave said: "There were some problems with the website this morning, but they have now been fixed and this afternoon the site is operating normally, though we are keeping an eye on things." She added that the £5 billion savings of Icesave's 200,000 UK depositors were protected by a combination of the UK and Icelandic deposit guarantee schemes. In the unlikely event of a failure by Icesave the first 20,887 euros (£16,317) of any savings would be covered by the Icelandic protection fund, while the remaining part of the first £50,000 of any savings would be covered by the UK scheme.

Sceptics have questioned how well placed the Icelandic scheme would be to pay out because it has only £88 million in the kitty to cover deposits totalling £13 billion, or 154 times as much.

The Icesave spokeswoman added: “The Icelandic Government has made clear it would step in to fund any shortfall.” But sceptics have again questioned whether an already beleaguered Icelandic Government would be in a position to guarantee deposits totalling about twice the country’s entire GDP.

Icesave said that in the extremely unlikely event that the Icelandic Government was not able to meet its guarantee three other Scandinavian governments - Sweden, Norway and Denmark - would back Iceland in an emergency.

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