Nationwide Building Society has apologised after customers reported payments being blocked in shops and online on 21 February and said the problem has now been resolved.

The building society has not yet been able to confirm what caused some card payments to be declined, but a spokesperson said: "This matter has now been resolved and the card payment process is working normally."

On 21 February, disgruntled customers took to Twitter, with customer, JC Ryan ?(@JCRyanTweets) tweeting: ‘Nationwide Building Society! Thank you for declining my card because your computer systems are down! No excuse.’

The malfunction comes after Nationwide revealed 316,000 new current accounts were opened in the nine months to the end of last year, a 20% jump on the same period the previous year.

Last month, a quarter of Lloyds customers were also blocked from using their debit cards.

Other IT glitches were experienced by RBS/NatWest customers on Cyber Monday in 2013 as well as in the summer of 2012, when the bank left customers unable to access money for a number of days.

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A Nationwide spokesman said: ‘Unfortunately some of our customers are experiencing problems making card payments. Internet banking, cash machines and transactions in branch are not affected.

‘We apologise for the inconvenience this has caused and we are working to resolve this situation as quickly as possible.’