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On Christmas morning, tens of thousands of people received a surprise from an unexpected benefactor: Santander.
On December 25, the bank made a mistake and deposited £130 million into 75,000 accounts.
According to The Times, Santander's employees are now frantically trying to reclaim the funds, which is made more difficult by the fact that much of it was deposited in rival banks' accounts.
Payments from 2,000 business accounts were made twice, resulting in the error.
"We're sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients' accounts," the bank said in a statement.
"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."
According to the report, the error may have resulted in some employees being paid twice from their employer's account, with the second payment funded by Santander.
Christmas has been ruined.
According to the BBC, the blunder cast a pall over Christmas and Boxing Day, according to one payroll manager who did not want to be identified.
"It ruined my holiday period because I thought I'd paid out hundreds of thousands in error - I thought I had done something wrong," they told the BBC.
"I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work."
They claimed that Santander had provided no guidance on how businesses should explain the second payment to employees or how it should be repaid.
The payroll manager described the situation as "a complete shambles." "How they are going to recover it, I just don't know."
The bank stated that it had already begun discussions with rival banks, including Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank, and Virgin Money, according to The Times.
These banks will "look to recover the money from their customers' accounts," according to Santander.
However, it was unclear how banks would react if their customers had already spent the money, putting them in danger of going into debt if they returned it.
Santander has stated that it may contact individuals directly in order to recover the funds.
By fLEXI tEAM