Bank customers in Sussex have been left irate after technical problems hit their accounts.

NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) customers in the county have found their balances are not being updated and that they cannot use some online services.

The banking group apologised to its customers for the nationwide problems, which began yesterday (June 21), and said it is working hard to fix them.

RBS could not say exactly how many people have been affected by the issues but said it hoped to resolve the problems as soon as possible.

Jon Silver, a freelance writer in Brighton, said it was a worrying feeling waking up to discover your pay cheque was missing.

He said: “Some of my friends and I had pay going into our accounts and this morning we were greeted with no money.

“Everyone was ringing their employers saying they had not been paid only to be told it was the bank.

“Then we rang the bank and get this announcement saying there were system problems.

“The bank is quick to penalise people when they go slightly overdrawn without mercy but never keen to compensate for its errors.”

Bob Spearman, from Petworth, said his tax credit payment had not been paid into his NatWest account.

He said: “Like many other low-income families, we live from week to week and the Child Tax Credit weekly payment is a lifeline on which we rely.”

A spokeswoman for UK Payments Administration, which oversees payments generally, said the problem was not a central one and therefore it did not appear to have affected other banks.

However, people expecting payments from people or businesses which bank with NatWest and RBS could encounter delays due to the technical issues at their end, she said.

She added: “We don’t know exactly what the issue is yet. We don’t think it is affecting all payments.”

A statement from RBS said: “We are currently experiencing technical issues which mean that a number of customer account balances have not yet been updated and some of our online services are temporarily unavailable.

“We apologise for the inconvenience caused to our customers.”

Last week RBS and NatWest, which has more than 7.5 million personal banking customers, launched a mobile banking app enabling people to take money from an ATM by making a request on their mobile phone.