Many HSBC customers found themselves unable to pay for meals and shopping on Friday night after online banking services went down.

The bank posted on Twitter at 1.37am that services were reinstated following an investigation into the outage.

It had confirmed the outage at 10.30pm on Friday night, with users replying with complaints about leaving items for collateral in restaurants and leaving supermarkets without groceries.

Some users replying on Twitter said they had been unable to use the service since 8pm.

“Banking services are back up and running following an earlier service disruption,” HSBC UK said.

“To those impacted, thanks very much for your patience and we’re really sorry for the inconvenience.”