HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, and Nationwide banking apps saw outages affecting millions

Customers started reporting problems this morning

Thousands of banking customers faced chaos this morning after three major banks saw their online banking and app services go down.

Digital banking services at HSBC, Virgin Money and Nationwide were all reported to be experiencing difficulties on Friday morning. According to DownDetector's website, over 7,000 problems were reported around 8.45am for HSBC with spikes in outages for Virgin Money and Nationwide Building Society.

Barclays also reportedly faced issues with its Faster Payment system today while Lloyds Bank customers complained that they were unable to use the mobile app. Responding to a customer on X who complained Barclays wrote: "The team are doing everything they can to support the Faster Payment system scheme to get this back up and running." Lloyds support team told users experiencing issues such as the app freezing to contact their internet banking team.

HSBC confirmed that the issue was fixed on Friday afternoon with the problem with logging into online bank accounts having been fixed around lunchtime. HSBC says the problems were caused by an "internal technical error". While the wider payment problems were down to a technical issue with a third-party provider.

An HSBC UK spokesperson: “Earlier issues with HSBC UK’s online and mobile banking services, as well as a separate payments issue affecting multiple banks, are now fixed. We’re really sorry to our customers who were impacted, and we continue to monitor systems closely. “

Did you experience issues with accessing your banking app this morning? Get in touch by emailing: [email protected]

Frustrated customers took to X, formerly known as Twitter, to vent their frustrations about being unable to access their bank accounts online or through their mobile app. Some highlighted that it was their payday and they needed to access funds to settle bills.

Nationwide replied to a string of customers on X complaining that they had not received their wages in their accounts. “This has happened several times before”, one user complained, while another said it was “twice now in the past couple of months” that they had experienced a delay. Nationwide said it was “aware there is a delay with some customers receiving their salary or pension payments today”. Nationwide added: "These payments are being processed, and will be paid into your account today. Sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.”

Virgin Money acknowledged on X that it was "aware of intermittent issues with accessing online banking and our app, which we're working to resolve as quickly as possible". 'Thanks for your patience while we restore the service." This followed an earlier post alerting customers to "delays to payments both in and out of their Virgin Money account", and advising people not to attempt to make a payment again if they had received an error message.

Last month, on the same date, NatWest suffered a roughly four-hour outage that impacted its mobile and online banking services.