Bank Accidentally Gives Away $175 Million

A bank in the U.K. accidentally gave out the equivalent of $175 million to customers in an error on Christmas Day, CNN reported.

The bank, Santander, apologized for the mistake and said it would work to fix duplicate payments, according to CNN.

“We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” Santander said, CNN reported. “None of our clients were at any point left out of pocket as a result and we will be working hard with many banks across the UK to recover the duplicated transactions over the coming days.”

The bank blamed the issue on payment scheduling errors, saying that the problem was quickly addressed with attempts to recover the funds.

The bank encountered an issue in May following a technical failure that made it impossible for customers to make payments for most of a day, and it had another problem in August 2020, when thousands of customers were temporarily locked out of their accounts, according to The Times.

Santander is owned by a Spain-based company, and it has 14 million customers, CNN reported.