Nationwide payments down AGAIN with customers unable to pay bills or get wages

NATIONWIDE customers are unable to pay their bills or receive their wages yet again this morning.

It’s the third time the bank’s servers have failed since Christmas Eve.

According to Downdetector, payment problems began just after 5am today.

By 9.30am, more than 200 outages had been reported by customers.

Nationwide account holders expressed frustration at the news on social media.

Twitter user Maria : “Is it going to last for the whole day because I’m really busy and I have to pay my bill but this delay has caused no money from my job.

“Please fix this as soon as possible.”

Account holder Adel Jones : “Please don’t tell me its down again.

“I’ve sent money to my nationwide account and FOR THE THIRD TIME it’s floating in thin air.”

Nationwide at 10.15am: “We’re sorry, there’s a delay affecting some payments to and from your account this morning.

“We’re working to fix this ASAP. Your Direct Debits and standing orders are unaffected and working normally.”

Once again, customers could this morning see payment delays while the outage continues.

The building society also directed account holders toward Nationwide’s , but said due to the outage “queues may be longer than usual”.

Nationwide added in a : “We don’t currently have a timescale for resolving this issue but any updates will be posted on our website.”

Account holder Sharon Wilkinson : “Can’t pay bills or receive payments. This is happening too often!

“I phoned as well. Told it was my end. Clearly isn’t!”

At 7.30am another account holder tweeted that they were having issues receiving payments, but Nationwide denied there were any outages.

Josephine : “There seems to be an issue with receiving payments.

“I’ve tried to send money to my Nationwide [account] and it’s declining the payments.”

Nationwide’s official Twitter account : “Hi Josephine, All our systems are working normally.

“Are you getting a rejection message?”

After speaking to a customer service agent on the phone, Josephine was still unhappy.

She wrote: “The man was unhelpful.

“I’ve been told there’s no issue it must be something with me.

“As you can see all morning people have been enquiring on Twitter if your systems are down again as money isn’t being received.”

The bad news comes just days after Nationwide’s second outage in a matter of days.

Customers reported they were unable to send or receive payments on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.

A Nationwide spokesperson told us the outage took place because of system overheating – with more than 10 million payments sent overnight.

They said: “As a result of extremely high volumes of transactions on the first working day of the year we took the decision to temporarily queue inbound faster payments.

“We hope to get our systems back to normal and apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of these delays.

“Members do not need to resend any payments as they will be processed as soon as possible.

“Members can continue to use their cards to pay for goods and services, access the Internet Bank and Banking App and withdraw cash from ATMs.”

Will I get refunds for missed payments?

Unlike telecoms companies, banks do not have a fixed compensation scheme for service disruption, although depending on how much it has affected you, you may be entitled to some money back.

Last week’s issues saw Nationwide promise affected customers a refund on any late payment fees charged to their account because of the crash.

It’s not known yet whether the same will happen for today’s outage.

It is worth gathering evidence of your problems so you can make a formal complaint to Nationwide directly.

Try to make a note of when you were unable to access the website or app, plus any costs you incurred as a result.

If your credit rating has been affected by a service outage, because you got a late payment fee after being unable to make a transaction, for example, you should also keep a record of this.

If you spoke to anyone to try and resolve the problem, make a note of their name and when you spoke to them, as well as roughly what you discussed and what they advised you to do.

The news comes days after Santander accidentally paid out £130million to thousands of accounts on Christmas Day in a huge blunder.

Monzo Bank also went down in the run-up to Christmas too.

And Sky Broadband’s crash saw hundreds of customers unable to access the internet recently.