HSBC and Virgin Money among banking customers facing pay day outages

HSBC has become the latest bank to apologise to customers after some were left locked out of their online banking on what is commonly pay day for workers across the country.

Virgin Money and Nationwide also apologised to customers experiencing issues with digital banking services on Friday.

“We’re really sorry that some customers are having issues accessing personal online and mobile banking,” HSBC UK said on the service status page of its website.

“Our IT teams are working hard to get these services back to normal.

“You can still authorise online card purchases via SMS.”

Disgruntled customers took to X, formerly Twitter, to complain that they were unable to access their bank accounts online or on their mobile app.

Some pointed out that it was pay day for them and they needed to access money to pay bills.

According to the website DownDetector, more than 7,000 problems were reported at about 8.45am.

The site also shows a spike in reports of outages for high street bank Virgin Money and building society Nationwide on Friday morning.

Nationwide replied to a string of customers on X complaining that they had not received their wages into 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”.

It added: “These payments are being processed, and will be paid into your account today. Sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.”

Virgin Money said 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.”

It follows an earlier post alerting customers to “delays to payments both in and out of their Virgin Money account”, and asking people not to try again to make a payment if they had received an error message.

Last month, occurring on the same date, NatWest experienced an approximately four-hour outage affecting its mobile and online banking services.