Commonwealth Bank customers have been hit by a nationwide outage, with widespread reports of people being unable to pay for shopping or access accounts.

The bank, Australia’s largest, confirmed the outage in a social media post on Tuesday morning.

“We’re aware some of you are experiencing difficulties accessing our services and we’re urgently investigating. We apologise and thanks for your patience, we’ll provide an update soon,” it said.

But by early afternoon there had been no further updates from the bank.

It is the Commonwealth’s third outage in three weeks, leaving many customers frustrated.

“This is so infuriating. This is the second time I’ve been sick and not able to eat because I haven’t been able to access my funds. And I haven’t been compensated for the first time,” one angry customer wrote on Twitter.

“Thank you to the wonderful lady at Westfield Geelong who gave me a free parking pass so I could leave. Was about to bawl my eyes out because I was locked in town and racking up what could have been a massive parking fine,” wrote another.

The CBA was also taking heat on website DownDetector.com.au, where thousands of complaints had been logged.

The bank’s app and merchant terminals also crashed on June 23.

A week earlier it was hit, along with the ANZ and Westpac and smaller financial institutions, by a broad nationwide outage. It also affected Virgin Australia, Australia Post and a swathe of other companies and was blamed on an issue with US-based global content network and cloud service provider Akamai.

-more to come