Month of bank IT failures in the last two years, MPs say

Nine major banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated at least 803 hours – the equivalent of 33 days – of tech problems in the past two years, figures published by a group of MPs show.

The Treasury Committee – which has been investigating the impact of banking outages – compelled Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank to provide the data.

It does not include the Barclays outage in January or the Lloyds outage last week – two incidents which occurred on pay day for many people, and left customers unable to pay their staff and bills.

The report finds Barclays could now face compensation payments of £12.5m.

Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame Meg Hillier said: “For families and individuals living pay check to pay check, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience.”

The Treasury Committee data looked at IT failures which affected millions of customers between January, 2023 and February this year. They found there had been 158 incidents.

While the data does not include the Barclays outage in January, which left one family without a home, the bank did confirm to the committee that over half of online payments over the course of three days did not work due to “severe degradation” of their system’s performance.

The bank confirmed to the committee that it expects to pay between £5m and £7.5m in compensation to customers for “inconvenience or distress”.

When taking into account all of the information shared by Barclays, this means the bank could pay out up to £12.5m in compensation due to outages over the last two years.

The second highest amount paid out by a firm in that same period is £350,000 from the Bank of Ireland.