Nationwide, NatWest, TSB, First Direct and Barclays: Online banking problems on payday - why do banking apps crash on Fridays?

Monitoring site DownDetector has reported that thousands of people are having trouble with banking apps including those of Lloyds, Nationwide, First Direct, TSB, Barclays, Bank of Scotland.

Nationwide and First Direct have both confirmed issues with their online banking systems on Friday morning, leaving many customers without access to funds on payday. Both banks said they were working to return their systems to normal. First Direct has said that all is back to normal now.

One expert has speculated that it is because banks are planning software updates for the weekend, when their business tends to be quieter.

Nationwide said in a message on its website that “some incoming and outgoing payments are delayed at the moment”, but that “everything else is working normally”.

It said direct debits and standing orders were working as normal, but that payments were in a queue and would arrive soon, adding that customers did not need to do anything.

Meanwhile, First Direct confirmed on its website that both its mobile and online banking were “experiencing issues with payments”.

Lloyds and Halifax confirmed issues with customers being unable to log in to online banking and their respective mobile banking apps, while TSB also confirmed it is having “intermittent” issues with online and mobile banking.

At the end of last month and in early February, Barclays, Lloyds Bank and Halifax were all hit by service outages which left customers unable to access funds on or just after payday.

Fintech expert Chris Skinner told the PA news agency in the wake of those outages that banks were finding it “too hard to keep up” with fast-moving technology.

“I think the world is spinning so fast with technology that the challenge we have is no-one’s keeping up, particularly regulators and lawmakers,” he said.

“So the regulators and lawmakers need to have people who do better due diligence. I think there’s an issue here with reliability, service and resilience, and that’s the accountability of the people who are organising the structures, both from within the business, and those who look over the business in terms of the regulators. At the moment, I think both are probably finding it too hard to keep up.”

He added the vast array of modern tech systems needed to operate in the banking world today mean firms have “such a smorgasbord of things they have to work with”, the “competence of keeping up with these changes is really challenging every bank”.

Mr Skinner, who also runs industry blog The Finanser, said the flurry of outages on Fridays – and sometimes close to paydays – is likely due to banks planning software updates for weekends as it tends to be a quieter time to carry out such work.