LONDON — Thousands of people received a surprise gift on Christmas Day this year when European bank Santander accidentally deposited £130 million ($176 million) across 75,000 transactions.

It was a mistake when payments were made twice from U.K. accounts. This meant that some employees received double wages and their suppliers were paid more than they expected.

According to the bank’s explanation, the duplicative payments were due to a “scheduling problem” which has been fixed.

The bank is currently trying to recover the incorrect payments. Many of these have been transferred into accounts managed by other banks.

Santander spokeswoman told CNBC that some payments received from corporate clients had been incorrectly duplicated. 

“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 reports, the incident could have affected the mood of payroll employees on Christmas Day or Boxing Day.

“It ruined my holiday period because I thought I’d paid out hundreds of thousands in error — I thought I had done something wrong,” one payroll manager reportedly told the BBC. “I believed it was me, and I was going get into trouble at work.”

According to the report, the payroll manager stated that Santander had not shared any details about the repayment process or how companies should explain it to employees.

Santander explained that recovering the funds involves an industry process called “bank error recovery process”. The bank said it had begun working with other banks according to the process, and these banks would look into recovering the accidental payments from customer accounts.

The company stated that it has the capability to directly recover funds from individuals’ accounts.