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The glitch caused personal information of two customers, including addresses, telephone numbers and credit card details, to be published on the company's Web site. A spokesman for Woolworths said this morning that there have been no reports of the credit cards being used fraudulently, and that the customers concerned have already arranged for them to be cancelled.

The cause of the incident is still unknown, but Woolworths has taken the rather extreme step of shutting down its Web server altogether. "We don't want to reactivate our Web site, only for the problem to re-occur a few days later," said the spokesman.

As with the Powergen fiasco last month, in which customers' credit card details were also made available on the company's Web

According to Woolworths, the Web site will remain unavailable until the cause of the problem has been identified and rectified, but the spokesman could not give an indication of how long this might take.

Meanwhile, Barclays is rapidly gaining a reputation as the Fawlty Towers of online banking. The bank is at the centre of another row over security.

After logging out of its Internet banking service, a customer was perturbed to discover that she was able to re-access her account by clicking the 'back' button - she was not asked to re-enter her password.

A spokesperson for Barclays said that customers are told to log off and clear their browser's cache after using the online banking service, and that it does not consider this to be a security flaw. Nevertheless, security experts agree that this sort of data shouldn't be stored in a persistent manner at all, and that Barclays' recommended 'workaround' is wholly unacceptable.

Joel Harrison