Massive gas price increase takes effect from today in Northern Ireland

The price rise, an eye watering increase of 56.3%, will apply to Firmus customers in both the Greater Belfast and Ten Towns network areas.

It comes on the back of a series of electricity price increases that kicked in over the weekend from SSE Airtricity, Click Energy, and Electric Ireland.

The price rises appeared to prompt a surge in the number of people trying to purchase top-ups before the cost of electricity went up.

Another electricity provider, Budget Energy, is due to increase prices from Friday.

Ahead of the weekend’s increases, the website of one of the larger providers appeared to succumb to a surge of people logging on to buy top-ups at the lower rate and to submit meter readings.

SSE apologised to customers when its website and apps went offline on Friday, and pledged to honour any meter readings submitted by noon yesterday at the lower rate after its services were back up and running again.

And the company who process top-up payments told the BBC that there had been an “unprecedented” rush for top-ups in the 24 hours before the price increases kicked in.

For SSE customers, the price has now gone up by 35.4%. Click Energy customers are now paying 28.2% more for electricity, and for Electric Ireland prices have gone up by 29%.

On October 7, Budget Energy customers can expect to pay 32% more for electricity.

SSE also hiked its gas prices on Saturday by 28.3%.

In a statement, a spokesperson for SSE said: “We experienced a major system outage on Friday, September 30 which impacted our online self-service platform and the SSE Airtricity app.

“This was caused by surging demand which reached double our peak capacity for online service requests.”

The spokesperson continued: “We apologise to all our customers for the inconvenience and would like to assure you that no customer will be financially impacted by this outage.”

By yesterday afternoon, services appeared to be back to normal.

“Our IT and operational teams worked throughout the night and our systems have started to come back online and operate as normal.

“Our team are continuing to monitor for issues throughout the weekend and ask any customer experiencing technical issues to please bear with us and try again later. Pre-pay-meter customers can continue to purchase vends from usual outlets and online as our systems come available.”

PayPoint, which operates the top-up card system, told the BBC one retailer in Northern Ireland had processed a total of 45,000 energy top-ups on Friday – up from the usual total of around 5,000.

The company told the broadcaster some retailers struggled as they hit their daily quota of energy sales in spite of sales limits having been quadrupled in recent weeks.

The UK government, meanwhile, has promised that it will limit household energy bills by placing a cap on the amount charged to customers per unit of energy – with the difference paid to energy companies by the public purse.