Three of the UK’s biggest retail and online banks saw an outage to their services on Friday (29 June), affecting customers at a time when payslips and bills are often due.
Virgin Money, HSBC, Barclays and Nationwide all acknowledged on X (formerly Twitter) that payments services were hit by an outage on Friday morning. The banks responded to complaints left by customers on social media.
“We’ve experienced an issue this morning where some customers have seen delays to payments both in and out of their Virgin Money account,” a Virgin Money X post read.
“If you have tried to send a payment from your Virgin Money account and received an error message, please do not try to make the payment again.”
Virgin Money was able to resolve the issue for the majority of customers by mid-morning on Friday, although some continued to report difficulties with the company’s app. The bank noted that its app was continuing to run slow.
The bank also informed customers not to attempt to repeat payments if they had received an error message. Just before 1pm, it then announced that its mobile app had been fully restored.
HSBC, meanwhile, was able to get its online and mobile banking services back online just after midday. Like Virgin Money, the bank issued an apology to its customers, and stated that it was working on resolving secondary issues.
The bank’s X statement read; “We’re really sorry that some customers are having issues accessing personal online and mobile banking. Our IT teams are working hard to get these services back to normal. You can still authorise online card purchases via SMS.”
Barclays statement offered some more explanation, stating that the outage had impacted the entire faster payments system.
However, users still expressed frustration. One HSBC customer notably called out the closure of UK retail banking services, something that has affected not just HSBC, but several other banks such as Llloyds, TSB, Barclays and Metro Bank.
This has occurred against a backdrop of customers increasingly turning to mobile and digital services, leading to banks seeing less demand for retail services. Nationwide is one of the few outliers to this, issuing a commitment to close no branches until 2028, and observing continuing customer appetite for retail banking in surveys.
Regarding its own outage, Nationwide informed the BBC that it was aware of “third-party payments issues impacting some providers, including Nationwide” which had “delayed a small number of payments”.
The bank continued: “This has unfortunately delayed a small number of payments, which we expect will be processed and paid later today. The overwhelming majority of payments were processed as normal. All other services are working as normal.”
The outages come just a couple of months after a series of other notable failures in the UK’s online banking system. One of these impacted Nationwide just after the bank announced its acquisition of Virgin Money, followed by another affecting TSB and Lloyds in May.
