Nationwide customers hit by online account deletion glitch

Nationwide's Exeter branch

Nationwide Building Society has apologised after an unknown technical glitch made some customer accounts disappear when viewed through its online banking portal this morning.

Customers used the social networking site Twitter to raise the alarm, after many logged into Nationwide's online banking systems this morning to discover their current and savings account balances had been wiped out.

Some of our customers were unable to access their accounts this morning due to a technical issue.

In other cases, the accounts appeared to have been completely deleted, with both desktop and mobile users seemingly affected.

In a statement to IT Pro, a Nationwide spokesperson said: "Some of our customers were unable to access their accounts this morning due to a technical issue. This has now been fixed and we apologise for any inconvenience this has caused."

IT problems are an all too common issue for banking firms, as they increasingly push customers to use their online account management services and ditch paper-based statements for cost and environment reasons.

For example, the re-launch of High Street banking brand TSB was marred earlier this month by technical problems that stopped customers accessing their online accounts.

Meanwhile, the Royal Bank of Scotland was forced to apologise to 17.5 million customers in June 2012 after a botched software update stopped overnight money transfers taking place, causing many to miss rent, mortgage and salary payments.

This latest Nationwide tech glitch comes more than a year on from its highly publicised duplicate payment problems, which resulted in some customer accounts being debited twice.

At the time of the incident in July 2012, the issue was blamed on human error, with Nationwide offering to compensate customers who may have incurred overdraft or late payment charges as a result.

Caroline Donnelly is the news and analysis editor of IT Pro and its sister site Cloud Pro, and covers general news, as well as the storage, security, public sector, cloud and Microsoft beats. Caroline has been a member of the IT Pro/Cloud Pro team since March 2012, and has previously worked as a reporter at several B2B publications, including UK channel magazine CRN, and as features writer for local weekly newspaper, The Slough and Windsor Observer. She studied Medical Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism at PMA Training in 2006.