Many property transactions have been disrupted by IT issues which hit several major banks at the end of last week, it has been reported.

On Friday, which was payday for millions of people and when many property deals go through, Lloyds and Halifax banking apps went down.

There were also problems at TSB, Bank of Scotland, as well as Nationwide and First Direct, affecting online and mobile services, preventing people from making payments or transferring funds.

I am completing on a house sale today, will this affect that transaction?”

More than 4,000 customers reported issues with Lloyds and over 3,000 with Halifax, The Times reports. The numbers complaining about other banks were in the hundreds. Lloyds later said the issues had been resolved.

One bank customer called ‘Tyler B’ posted on Sky’s Money Blog: “I am completing on a house sale today, will this affect that transaction?”

Another, called ‘Ken’, said: “The Lloyd’s banking app was working and was in the middle of making a bank transfer and it generated a HTML error. Since then I’ve not been able to login to check if the payment went through.”

WhatsApp messages were also affected by IT problems on Friday.

Impact of IT failures

Recently, MPs on the House of Commons Treasury Committee wrote to nine banks asking for information about the impact of IT failures.

Just before Christmas, property deals in Scotland were hit by a cyber security issue at the country’s insolvency service.

Any transaction requiring a search via the Register of Insolvencies was affected by the IT failure that lasted four working days, throwing many property deals into doubt.

Accountant in Bankruptcy, which runs the register, suspended its search service while it dealt with the issue. But agents and conveyancers trying to get deals over the line before the festive break were left frustrated by the outage.