Nationwide payments down: Online banking hit by more issues in latest outage

Nationwide’s payment system appears to have broken again, after a number of outages over the festive season.

The problems led to a flurry of complaints on Twitter, where users complained that they had been left waiting on payments that had failed to arrive.

In response, the building society told customers that it was experiencing a delay with payments both leaving and arriving in accounts.

It was working to fix it as soon as possible and payments that were affected would be “processed as normal”, it said.

A similar message was displayed on Nationwide’s “service status” page, where it also assured customers that everything else was working as normal. Customers can continue to move money between accounts, use their cards to pay for things online and in shops, use internet banking or withdraw at cash machines, it said.

But it did note that users could have issues with a delay in payments as they come into or out of an account.

It warned customers that they should not do anything about any money that has already been sent, which is waiting in a queue. As such, trying to push through a payment again could actually lead to paying twice over.

Likewise, customers can still receive or send payments even during such outages – but those might not actually go through for a while.

Direct debits and standing orders are not affected by the problems and will work as normal, it said.