Some 24.4m retail customers of Lloyds Banking Group and the Co-op Bank were hit by a major systems failure on Friday afternoon, with cards rejected and online banking blocked for hours.
Reports on Twitter exposed of the chaos around the country with ten of thousands of unhappy customers of Lloyds TSB, Halifax and Bank of Scotland inundating branches and contact centres to complain.
Lloyds was unable to say how many of its 22 million customers were hit during the problems but claimed it would work through the backlog of payments to ensure that all were completed.
Lloyds said: “We know our customers rely on us, and we apologise for the inconvenience we have caused them.”
Some 2.4 million Co-op customers were also hit – including customers of the its online bank Smile. It said in a statement: “We are currently experiencing a temporary issue with our banking systems which has resulted in some customers being unable to access their accounts.”
The move follows the fiasco which hit 12 million customers of Royal Bank of Scotland in June.
Millions of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers spent days without access to their cash as salaries and payments were not credited to accounts, leaving customers unable to get cash and having debit card transactions turned down.
It was forced to earmark £125m to compensate customers affected by the glitch. RBS later blamed an “IT software upgrade” for the computer chaos.
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