Barclays customers hit by debit card glitch

Thousands of Barclays customers in the north of the UK had payments wrongly taken from their accounts, the bank has admitted.

However, by early afternoon the bank said the problem had been fixed, and all customers had been refunded.

It said an "incredibly low" percentage of its customers had suffered from duplicated debit card transactions.

It follows a problem with card payments at Asda over the weekend, although that problem too has since been fixed.

Apology

A spokesperson for Barclays said: "We detected a small number of duplicated debit card payments this morning.

"We apologise for any inconvenience caused and any affected customers will not be out of pocket."

Barclays has 15 million card customers in the UK, but it said that "a fraction of a per cent" of them had been affected by the problem.

The bank added that those affected were in the north of the country, but it could not be more specific.