Nationwide Building Society customers were unable to send or receive payments for much of Friday morning (22 March).
According to the BBC, customers reported that money had left their accounts upon making a payment but the funds had not appeared in the receiving account. Other customers complained of wages not entering their accounts and bill payments not occurring.
The bank, which is the UK’s largest building society, confirmed that an IT glitch was the reason for the payments outage, and announced around midday that the issue had been resolved.
In an update on X (formerly Twitter), Nationwide stated: “Following a fault earlier this morning, payments are now flowing again and any queued payments will be processed over the next few hours. You don’t need to resend your payment. We are very sorry for any inconvenience caused.”
However, some Nationwide customers continued to report difficulties on X/Twitter, such as wages not arriving in bank accounts in time for bill payments.
The outage will have come at a difficult time for many, as some UK companies issue wage payments on the second to last week of the month.
The news of disruptions and customer dissatisfaction also overshadowed the announcement on Friday morning that Nationwide has reached an agreement with Virgin Money’s board for the acquisition of the latter.
Pending approval from regulators and Virgin Money shareholders, Nationwide will acquire its high-street and online rival for £2.9bn to create one of the UK’s largest banking entities.
