Lloyds TSB, Halifax tech stumbles into the cold, goes titsup for hours

Lloyds TSB and Halifax saw their faster payments system fall down yesterday morning after a computer problem at the weekend stretched into the beginning of the week.

The Faster Payments System processes payments within a few hours instead of the next day turnaround required to clock transactions over older systems. According to the Faster Payments website, over 85 per cent of phone and internet payments are processed through Faster Payments.

But it didn't work for Lloyds or Halifax customers - both part of the Lloyds TSB Group - for all of yesterday. All other payment systems were operational, said the Lloyds spokesperson, who stressed that payments could be processed but just less quickly, for most customers only next day delivery was possible.

Lloyds customers took to Twitter and a forum on MoneySavingExpert to complain that the service was down.

The company would not be pinned down on the root cause of the problem, which it would only describe as "something from the weekend". A spokeswoman told The Reg: "There hasn't been a failure it was just something from the weekend that we are aware of and working to fix."

Late on Monday afternoon, Lloyds issued the statement:

We are working hard to fix an issue that is currently affecting some faster payments. We apologise to customers affected by this, and we anticipate that the full service will be available later today. All of our other payment services are unaffected by this issue, and customers can continue to process the significant majority of transactions.

The service was apparently back up at 17.00 GMT yesterday, according to a statement Lloyds gave the BBC. However, at 18.00 GMT, the forum posters were still having trouble processing their payments. ®