British bank Nationwide has been hit by an IT outage that is stopping customers from receiving their salary or paying bills.

A similar outage caused chaos on December 22, with the company forced to refund charges, but not before some customers could not buy food for Christmas. The cause of both outages has not been disclosed.

“There is currently a delay regarding faster payments as a result of a technical issue which we are working hard to resolve," a Nationwide spokesperson said.

"Transactions are being temporarily queued while we get services back to normal and will be processed as soon as possible. All other services are working."

The company said that it would again refund any Nationwide fees or charges, however users may still be impacted by charges from other businesses that they cannot pay.

The outage has independently been verified by this reporter's inability to pay rent.