Nationwide banking 'back' after apparent IT failure

Nationwide says its online and mobile banking services are back following a technical glitch that lasted for several hours.

The building society said it was sorry for "any inconvenience" as customers took to social media to vent their frustrations at the failure.

The lender first acknowledged a "technical issue" early on Monday morning but was unable to give further details on what had caused the outage.

It announced after 11am that its systems were "back to normal" after a flurry of complaints via Twitter (Frankfurt: A1W6XZ - news) .

One user said: "It's happening every week, a new problem. Their internet service is absolutely shocking! I have no accounts when I log in."

Others pointed to anger about being pointed towards a Nationwide branch for help at a time when the sector is under fire for closing high street operations because of a customer shift towards online and mobile banking.

RBS (LSE: RBS.L - news) , which has suffered some of the most high-profile outages since the financial crisis, announced on Friday it was closing 259 more NatWest and RBS branches .

Lloyds and Yorkshire Building Society had also confirmed branch cuts earlier in the week.

British banks have been hit by regular IT outages - often on payday.

Customers of HSBC, NatWest, RBS, Lloyds and Halifax have been affected by glitches during this year.