SagePay has been hit by what appears to be yet another spectacular outage, only three months on since the payment processor, which serves 25,000 firms in the UK and Ireland, collapsed for 24 hours on 8 September.

Customers have contacted The Register to complain about SagePay's latest unscheduled lie-down.

The service, which was previously known as Protx, was handed the SagePay moniker when UK biz and accountancy software firm Sage acquired it in 2006.

"I was made aware of the outage not on my own site which uses SagePay but when I was trying to checkout on another site. Looks similar to the clusterfuck that was their system upgrade a while ago, when they ended up being off line and losing transactions for days," one Reg reader told us.

"Great timing being the busiest part of the year, perhaps their systems can't cope with the load," he said.

And there are more gripes from SagePay customers on the firm's forum.

We asked Sage to tell us what had gone wrong, but it hadn't got back to us at time of writing. However, a status page on the firm's website currently claims that the vendor has "identified the issue" and that its team was "working on a resolution."

In the meantime, SagePay is running on a backup database.

"Customers will currently be unable to view or perform actions such as Refund, Void, Repeat, RepeatDeferred, Release, Abort, Cancel and Authorise against any archived transactions. This will not affect any new Payment, Deferred and/or Authenticate transactions," it added.

It followed that up with the standard red rag to a bull sorry note:

"We apologise for any disruption or inconvenience this may cause and will provide an update shortly." ®