Nationwide accounts 'disappear' online after weekend IT upgrade

The building society said the problems had affected only online banking

Nationwide internet customers were previously affected in September 2013 when they were blocked from their accounts (Getty)

Millions of Nationwide customers were unable to access their accounts online yesterday after a planned IT upgrade at the weekend caused accounts to apparently “disappear”.

The mutual’s internet banking and mobile banking systems, as well as its mobile payments, were out of order yesterday morning after being offline over the weekend for maintenance. The online meltdown seems to have been caused after a planned upgrade on Sunday.

Nationwide’s banking customers took to Twitter to report that their current accounts had “vanished”. Kate Meighan of Manchester told The Independent she had been unable to access her account since Friday. “It was down over the weekend for ‘maintenance’ so I haven’t been able to check since Friday,” she said. “I’m used to bad customer service in-branch but their online service is usually spot on.”

Nationwide said it was aware of the issue and teams were investigating the problem as a “high priority”, and by about 9.15am yesterday the problems appeared to have been resolved.

The building society said the problems had affected only online banking, and told worried customers “Visa payments and cash withdrawals are unaffected”.

On its website, a message simply told customers: “We’re sorry to have to tell you that your online bank is unavailable. We are making every effort to restore service as quickly as possible.”

A spokeswoman told The Independent: “We are aware of an issue that meant some customers were unable to access the internet and mobile banks for a short period this morning. We have resolved the issue and apologise for any inconvenience caused. Throughout this period, customers could and still can use their cards to pay for goods and access funds at ATMs.”

However she was unable to identify the cause of the problems or reveal how many people had been affected by being unable to access their accounts for what could have been several crucial hours at the start of the working week.

The outage came just a few hours after Nationwide had tweeted that planned maintenance work on online banking services had been “successfully completed” and customers could once again access their accounts. Sadly that proved to be a little premature.

Meanwhile some tweeters asked the building society whether the apparent disappearance of their accounts online meant they didn’t need to repay their overdrafts or mortgages.

Long-suffering Nationwide internet customers have been hit by similar IT failures in the past. For about an hour one morning in September 2013, online current account and savings customers were blocked from their accounts or were wrongly told they were empty.

That meltdown caused annoyance among customers at it was close to payday.

Earlier that year Britain’s biggest building society was forced to apologise to its customers twice in one week after they were locked out of their accounts online, three days after a previous IT problem had supposedly been resolved.