Nationwide Building Society's Faster Payments turn into Slower Payments for 2022

Processing goes a bit TITSUP* at UK finance outfit

The UK's Nationwide Building Society has started the new year with a bork as customers found payments to and from accounts stalled as 2022 arrived.

Problems began this morning as worried customers contacted Nationwide to check what had become of incoming and outgoing payments. The building society's status page confirmed that there were problems and "incoming and outgoing payments are delayed at the moment," but "everything else is working normally."

The problem appears to be with sending and receiving money. Direct debits and standing orders, Nationwide said, "are unaffected." Cashpoints and card usage are also unaffected, according to the bank. However, there might be a wait for money (say, a salary payment) to arrive.

It appears the problems are by design. A spokesperson told The Register: "As a result of extremely high volumes of transactions on the first working day of the year we took the decision to temporarily queue faster payments."

Far be it from us to wonder how Nationwide was caught out by this sudden increase in demand. If only things were a bit more scalable. The building society shifted its member website (completely unconnected to the current issue, we might add) to Azure last year, with the Windows giant trumpeting that "Microsoft's cloud can better cope with spikes in member demand."

Sadly, Microsoft's cloudy magic dust does not appear to have been sprinkled over the payment processing system as Nationwide applied the brakes.

"To put this in context," the spokesperson went on, "more than 10 million payments were processed overnight. This has been done to ensure we can manage and process those payments, which were taking much longer than normal due to the numbers received.

"We hope to get our systems back to normal as soon as possible and apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of these delays. Members do not need to resend any payments as they will be processed as soon as possible. All other services are working normally. Members can continue to use their cards to pay for goods and services, access the Internet Bank and Banking App and withdraw cash from ATMs." ®

*Tottering Infrastructure Totally Stuffs Up Payments