Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Nationwide, TSB, Bank of Scotland and First Direct customers left without access to banking apps

Online issues across several banks have left customers without access to their accounts and banking apps on payday.

Problems have been reported by Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Nationwide, TSB, Bank of Scotland and First Direct.

Customers have been left without access to major banking apps on payday

Nationwide and First Direct have both confirmed issues with their online banking systems this morning, leaving many customers without access to funds.

It is the second month in a row major banks have been hit by IT issues around payday, with experts saying the online banking systems often struggle with the high activity rate as wages and bills go in and out of accounts at the end of each month.

In messages posted online, both banks say they are working to return their systems to normal.

Nationwide said in a statement on its website that “some incoming and outgoing payments are delayed at the moment” but “everything else is working normally”.

It says direct debits and standing orders were working as normal, but payments were in a queue and would arrive soon, adding customers did not need to do anything.

Meanwhile, First Direct confirmed on its website both its mobile and online banking were “experiencing issues with payments”.

Problems have been reported by Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Nationwide, TSB, Bank of Scotland and First Direct

Service outage site Downdetector shows a spike in the number of issues reported by customers of Lloyds Bank, Halifax, Nationwide, TSB, Bank of Scotland and First Direct.

Fintech expert Chris Skinner told the PA news agency that in the wake of those outages, banks were finding it “too hard to keep up” with fast-moving technology.

“I think the world is spinning so fast with technology that the challenge we have is no-one’s keeping up, particularly regulators and lawmakers,” he said.

“And so the regulators and lawmakers need to have people who do better due diligence.

“I think there’s an issue here with reliability, service and resilience, and that’s the accountability of the people who are organising the structures, both from within the business, and those who look over the business in terms of the regulators.

“At the moment, I think both are probably finding it too hard to keep up.”

He added the vast array of modern tech systems needed to operate in the banking world today meant that firms have “such a smorgasbord of things they have to work with” that the “competence of keeping up with these changes is really challenging every bank”.

Mr Skinner, who also runs industry blog The Finanser, says that flurry of outages on Fridays – and sometimes close to paydays – was likely due to banks planning software updates for weekends as it tends to be a quieter time to carry out such work.

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