Nationwide, HSBC, Barclays and Virgin Money customers have been affected by problems with banking services, leaving some unable to send and receive money.

The issues could affect those on what is commonly pay day for many across the country, with some reporting they have not received their salary.

HSBC UK said there had been a “separate payments issue affecting multiple banks”, and Nationwide blamed a “third-party payments issue”.

Barclays also alerted customers, while Virgin Money said access to its app has been fully restored after issues in the morning – but there is a backlog of payments to process.

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The Financial Conduct Authority said it was monitoring the situation and It is understood the Bank of England is engaging with the banks affected.

“We’re really sorry that some customers are having issues accessing personal online and mobile banking,” HSBC UK said on its website.

“Our IT teams are working hard to get these services back to normal. You can still authorise online card purchases via SMS.”

According to website DownDetector, more than 7,000 problems were reported at about 8.45am on Friday morning.

The site also shows a spike in reports of outages for high street bank Virgin Money, building society Nationwide and Barclays.

Nationwide customers complained on social media platform X they had not received their wages into their accounts.

The bank said it was “aware there is a delay with some customers receiving their salary or pension payments today”.

“These payments are being processed, and will be paid into your account today,” it added. “Sorry for any inconvenience this is causing.”

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Virgin Money said on X “like other banks” it is “working hard to process the backlog of payments delayed as quickly as possible”.

The bank had earlier alerted customers to delays to payments in and out of accounts and asked users not to try to make payments again if they had received an error message.

Barclays, responding to a user on X who said they have not been paid, said it was “aware of this issue” and is doing “everything… to get this resolved as quickly as possible”.

A Barclays customer said they have “thousands of pounds worth of payments due in” but “no one can pay me”.

“Absolutely marvellous at the end of the month and all my bills are due,” they added.

Last month, NatWest experienced a four-hour outage affecting its mobile and online banking services.

The owners of Cineworld are leaning towards putting its British operations through a formal restructuring process after holding initial talks about a sale with prospective buyers.

Sky News has learnt that the cinema chain and its advisers at AlixPartners have begun formally exploring a company voluntary arrangement (CVA) – a mechanism widely used by retailers and restaurant chains during the COVID pandemic to close stores and slash rents.

The details of a potential Cineworld CVA are still to be determined, with no visibility yet about any site closures or rent negotiations with landlords.

However, one insider said that an insolvency mechanism such as a CVA was now far more likely than an outright sale of the business.

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Sky News revealed earlier this month that Cineworld had drafted in AlixPartners to consider a sale.

The company trades from more than 100 sites in Britain, including at the Picturehouse chain, and employs thousands of people, although its public relations adviser refused to confirm either figure.

In a statement issued to Sky News earlier in the month, it said: “Like many businesses, we are continually reviewing our UK operations.”

Cineworld grew under the leadership of the Greidinger family into a global giant of the industry, acquiring chains including Regal in the US in 2018 and the British company of the same name four years earlier.

Its multibillion dollar debt mountain led it into crisis, though, and forced the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2022.

It delisted from the London Stock Exchange last August, having seen its share price collapse amid fears for its survival.

Under the deal struck last year, several billions dollars of debt were exchanged for shares, with a significant sum of new money injected into the company by a group of hedge funds and other investors.

Cineworld also operates in central and Eastern Europe, Israel and the US.

Since it emerged from bankruptcy protection, Cineworld has appointed a new leadership team, installing Eduardo Acuna, who ran Mexican cinema chain Cinepolis’s operations in the Americas, as its chief executive.

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Eric Foss, a former Pepsi executive, was parachuted in as Cineworld’s chairman.

One property industry source previously told Sky News that an attempt by Cineworld to pursue a CVA or other restructuring which compromised landlords was likely to be met with fierce resistance.

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An expert on the Post Office Horizon IT systems has denied suggestions he was “protecting the monster” in evidence he gave to the trial of a sub-postmaster who was wrongly convicted while pregnant.

Former senior Fujitsu engineer Gareth Jenkins told the Post Office Inquiry he did not hide glitches in the branch accounting system at the trial of Seema Misra in 2010 – widely seen as a crucial test case at the time.

Mrs Misra was jailed for 15 months on the back of his evidence as an expert witness.

On his fourth day in the witness box at the inquiry, Mr Jenkins insisted he was telling the truth about what he knew of Horizon glitches in answers to questions on the scandal from her lawyer Flora Page.

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Ms Page described Horizon as an “out of control monster” by the time of her client’s trial and added that “hundreds of people had already had their lives ruined to protect it”.

She put it to Mr Jenkins: “Isn’t the truth that you knew Horizon was a monster and it was causing harm?”

He replied: “No, that’s not how I felt.”

Ms Page put to Mr Jenkins that he “threw mud in the jury’s eyes”, to which he said: “I did not.”

She put it to Mr Jenkins that failing to tell the court that he knew that transactions were being injected at the counter was failing to tell the whole truth.

He said: “I didn’t think that at the time.”

It was put to him that there were “thousands of known error log entries”, and Mr Jenkins said: “I’m not sure how many known error log entries there were, I don’t know the volumes.”

Ms Page said that during the trial Mr Jenkins was asked if he knew whether there were any problems with the Horizon system that Fujitsu was aware of, and put it to him that the truthful answer would have been “cash accounts, remote access, tampering, bad error handling, silent faults across the system, the EPOSS code, the terrible code, hardware failures, persistent hardware failures, recovering transactions that were lost”.

Mr Jenkins replied: “That was not how I understood the question to be.”

“You hid all these issues and problems when you gave evidence against Seema Misra, didn’t you?” Ms Page said.

He replied “no”, then later added: “I did not believe that I deliberately hid anything.”

Mr Jenkins, who is facing a police investigation for alleged perjury, told the inquiry in his witness statement that Post Office, which has a power to bring its own prosecutions, had applied pressure on him to support its case.

He claimed Post Office lawyer Warwick Tatford had looked over a draft of his witness statement for Mrs Misra’s trial and recommended he “make some points more strongly in favour of the Post Office”.

He explained how he thought such actions had been “normal practice”, saying he had not understood his duties of impartiality as an expert witness in trials until 2020, by which time he had been involved in more than a dozen cases.

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He later conceded, however, in his evidence that he had seen advice setting out what was expected of him in 2016, explaining that had not been the focus for him in the documents he received.

Also on Thursday, Mr Jenkins told the inquiry where he thought the blame could be laid.

“My feeling was then and is now that the issues to do with this are down to the way Post Office has behaved rather than actual faults in the Horizon system… I believe that I told the truth as I understood it at the time.”

“You were a Fujitsu man doing what Fujitsu needed you to do to protect the monster,” Ms Page put to him.

Mr Jenkins said: “I didn’t think it was a monster.”

During his evidence, Mr Jenkins has said he was sorry for what happened to Mrs Misra.

She told Sky News on Tuesday that she would not accept that apology.