High street lender TSB has apologised to customers after many were left without benefit and salary payments for hours due to a systems error.

TSB said the problems started in the early hours of the morning, with some Bankers’ Automated Clearing System (Bacs) payments not appearing in customer accounts.

Customers complained on social media about not receiving salaries and child benefit payments for many hours.

The bank said it had fixed the problem by 2pm.

One TSB customer posted on X, formerly Twitter, in the morning about a missing payment.

She posted: “My direct debits are going to bounce and and I’m going to be charged both from u and the recipients.”

Another said: “This is a joke. You aren’t telling us when this is going to be resolved. I still don’t have my pension paid into my account and it’s now 12.45. When are we going to get our money? Getting really angry now.”

A TSB spokeswoman said: “We have fixed the issue with Bacs payments and have now credited all customer accounts that were due to receive money into them.

“We would like to apologise to customers that were impacted by this issue.”

A man uses a TSB cash machine
TSB said the problems started in the early hours of the morning (Gareth Fuller/PA)

It marks the latest in a line of recent technical glitches at UK banks, with Lloyds Bank and Virgin Money experiencing issues just weeks ago.

And it is another technical issue to impact TSB after a major IT meltdown in 2018 left nearly two million people locked out of their accounts when a systems upgrade went wrong.

The following year it also had to apologise to customers who were left without wages in their accounts on payday and was forced to offer emergency cash to those affected.

Meanwhile, in June, major technology outages affecting the digital services of several UK banks left some customers unable to send or receive money.

The problems stemmed from the “faster payment system” which enables digital transactions to be sent between banks and building societies within seconds.

Banks were also caught up in a global IT outage caused by a faulty update to widely-used cybersecurity software in July.