Any reason why payment volumes today would be any higher than a normal first working day of the month?

Bank Holidays, year end, xmas, new year, yadda yadda.

Everywhere I've been, any finance or banking systems go hell for leather at this time. If you are a multinational or have an overseas reporting obligation, the problem is compounded by the fact you have to do your annual financials for everywhere on the planet apart from the UK[1].

[1] Note for shifty foreign types: Our government likes to collectively put its feet up and get blind drunk over the holiday period. To facilitate this they have cunningly scheduled the financial and tax year to begin and end in April, after the hangover wears off.

Just as the width of our railway lines (and probably everyone else's) is derived from that of Roman carts (go to Pompeii to see the original ruts), so our tax year starts with the old Roman year on 26 March (Julian calendar). To make sure no-one lost out on rent, interest, etc, this became 6 April when adopted the Gregorean calendar, about 170 years after the southern half of Europe.

The start of the calendar and fiscal year always used to be on the 25th March, which became 5th of April under the Gregorian calendar, and we then adopted this new fangled idea of starting the calendar year on the 1st of January, but the fiscal year has stayed on the 5th of April.

A lot of bills normally go out from my account on the 1st, 2nd or 3rd of the month, as all those were a weekend or bank holiday, they've all hit my bank account today, and I've become considerably less well off very quickly.

According to an oxygen thief at Nationwide "incoming and outgoing payments are delayed at the moment," but "everything else is working normally.". Apart from processing incoming and outgoing payments, what other purpose does a bank account have?

Transferring money from customer accounts to their own account for charges and interest.

That is the main purpose of a bank.

I would have thought those charges and interest were outgoing payments. They certainly are on my bank account.

What are the chances those payments to Nationwide got delayed?

Not sure why the story misses a larger point, this is not an isolated issue due to high volumes they had two failures in December as well.

21st December - Payments in/out failed for the whole day, finally started working late in evening with delays. Was still slow on 22nd.

31st December - Payments in/out failed again for most of the day.

Now 4th January - Payments in failed.

These issues are causing a lot of pain for people who need the money coming into their account to be there on the day it is supposed to be and to be able to pay bills. Nationwide have left people with no money for gas/electricity/food as they don't have spare money to allow for pay/benefits to be late.

In my case I needed to pay a small family company for some work they had completed, thankfully I managed to sort that out from another bank account, otherwise I'd have left that company without the money to pay their suppliers/staff before Christmas.

At the current time Nationwide seem to have a broken system and be struggling to meet their requirements as a bank.

I was aware of the issues on the 21st December and into the 22nd, but not the other ones. Very unusual for Nationwide.

And they are a building society, not a bank, so their requirements are different.

I nearly put they are a Building Society but offer banking services and for domestic services are a "clearing bank" in their own right. They use HSBC for some International stuff such as Swift.

Nationwide are also the only Building Society who are members of Faster Payments Service, all others are banks.

They are "bank" in the sense that they offer banking services in addition to the savings and mortgage services that other building societies offer. I don't think there are any other building societies that do that. Yes they are legally registered as a Building Society because they have members rather than shareholders.

Note that this is the 3rd time in quick succession (1st just before Xmas, 2nd last week) that Nationwide has had processing delays with "faster" [sic] payments.

EDIT: AC just beat me to it...

Not surprised. Did a contract there not long ago. Very cavalier approach to security. Possibly cos the network team seem to be running security there. Saw things that would have got people fired at a proper bank. After what we saw all my team closed their Nationwide accounts.

Anyone try to report anything to the regulator?

As above. FWIW.

I still don't understand why banks computers have to stop processing transactions on bank holidays. It seems outdated in the modern world of online commerce that we are following rules written in the 19th century when banks were staffed by humans doing all the transactions. Its not like they have to pay it overtime rates to a server working on its day off.

I don't get bank's opening hours either.

My local Natwest is now closed on Saturday, the only day they were previously open when anyone who worked could get in to talk to a person. Not that it really matters, as they no longer have anyone in the branches who knows about "products" or that is able to make any decisions. Very much a case of customers being an inconvenience...

Still, not as bad as the local HSBC. I was helping a voluntary body look at banking options, and they said someone would have to drive 45 minutes to another branch if there was interested in opening an account. Went with an account with Starling in the end - the application took a matter of minutes online, didn't require any company or directors details to be entered, and the account was active within a few days.

Elsewhere on Reg is a hagiographic article telling geeks that they now rule the planet. Meanwhile, Nationwide isn't making payments and Santander made them twice. This is not a good sign for our chicken-head biting overlords.

Only looking at this from a very long way away but it does look like some kind of failsafe kicked in on a system that has a built-in throttle. You see similar things in exchanges nowadays as a way to handle potentially problematic transactions: sometimes it's better to bring things to halt than let run uncontrolled, especially if they could be the target of some kind of attack.

Moving money between banks, while now very fast, is not friction-free as it's a classic two-stage transaction.

Would anyone like to speculate on the cause? My guess is that on previous days they tipped into record high volumes, causing some kind of intermittent error/race condition. They then paused processing pending investigation on earlier outage days. Then started throttling the queue (as a fix) which has causing the delays today and just before Xmas?