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Hundreds of thousands of Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland customers were unable to make payments from their online accounts today.

Some have been facing the frustration of not being able to pay and transfer money online.

Others were not able to confirm whether funds were arriving in their account.

A spokesperson for Lloyds Banking Group, which owns the three brands, apologised but said its systems were now back up and running.

"However due to the issues experienced today there may be a delay in processing some of the payments that customers made earlier in the day. We continue to advise customers that they should not submit a second payment, to avoid duplicate payments being processed."

The bank said no customers would be out of pocket as a result of the IT issue.

Steve Davis, a quality engineer from Leicester said he was caught out by the problems this morning, when he was notified that a client's money had been transferred, but it failed to appear in his Halifax bank account.

"I got a notification of a transfer going in from the [banking] app... by 11 o'clock it hadn't appeared. Then by midday it still hadn't appeared".

Mr Davis said it wasn't until he called his bank that somebody told him of the IT failure, which he was told would be "fixed by 3pm".

"What was most infuriating was that nobody told us anything...[they] just leave us in the dark".

"You've got people on tight budgets who will be in the check-out queue tonight thinking a payment has gone in but it'll decline".