For many, the morning of December 25 started with what seemed to be a Christmas miracle.

UK bank Santander had mistakenly deposited a total of £130 million ($175 million) into 75,000 accounts to customers on Christmas day.

“We’re sorry that due to a technical issue, some payments from our corporate clients were incorrectly duplicated on the recipients’ accounts,” read the bank’s statement published on Thursday.

The payment was split over 75,000 transactions for almost 2,000 corporate and commercial customers.

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“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 statement added, according to a CNN report. 

The bank clarified that the duplicated payments could be blamed on a scheduling issue which was ‘quickly identified and rectified’. 

“The transactions were both regular and one-off payments which could have included supplier payments or wages,” Santander said.

It will be recovering the funds from recipient banks through the ‘bank error recovery process’, and procedures are in place to seek recovery of funds deposited in error directly from recipients, the bank has said, reported CNN. 

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Santander has already begun speaking to its rival banks, where much of the amount was deposited. These include Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Co-operative Bank and Virgin Money, according to The Times.

Those banks would “look to recover the money from their customers’ accounts,” Santander said.

A payroll manager told the BBC on the condition of anonymity, “It ruined my holiday period because I thought I’d paid out hundreds of thousands in error – I thought I had done something wrong,” adding, “I thought it was just me and that I was going to get in trouble at work.”

Santander, which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Banco Santander (headquartered in Spain), has 14 million active customers and 616 branches in the UK.