Finance
Britain's top banks clocked up 33 days' worth of IT glitches in two years
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 6, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 25, 2026
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on March 6, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 25, 2026
UK banks experienced over 800 hours of IT failures in two years, affecting millions. Barclays had the most outages, leading to compensation payouts.
LONDON (Reuters) -Britain's Treasury Committee said on Thursday that nine top UK banks and building societies suffered at least 803 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages in the last two years, blocking millions of customers from accessing their cash.
The cross-party group of lawmakers had asked banks last month for the number of instances and the amount of time in hours each of them had suffered IT failures that prevented customers from using their services.
At least 158 banking IT failure incidents took place between January 2023 and February 2025, according to the data gathered from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank.
The figures did not, however, include the most recent outages affecting Barclays customers between January 31 and February 2 and various other banks on February 28.
The Committee said it will be requesting further information from the banks on those outages.
Barclays, which reported 33 outages over the reporting period, said its most recent glitch led to the failure of 56% of online payments. It said it expects pay between 5-7.5 million pounds ($6.5-$9.7 million)in compensation to customers.
HSBC and Santander UK reported 32 glitches each, the second largest number of individual outages over the two-year period.
Nationwide reported 18, with NatWest and Lloyds reporting 13 and 12, respectively.
Chair of Treasury Select Committee, Meg Hillier, said she felt "reassured" banks were doing everything possible to minimise the impact on their customers.
"For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience," she said in a statement.
"I am particularly thankful to those who are compensating their customers well for the stress they endure and would encourage all to reflect on whether they are doing enough in that regard."
($1 = 0.7753 pounds)
(Reporting By Sinead Cruise; Editing by Amanda Cooper)
UK banks and building societies suffered at least 803 hours of unplanned tech and systems outages in the last two years.
Barclays reported the highest number of outages with 33 incidents over the reporting period.
Barclays' most recent glitch led to the failure of 56% of online payments.
The Treasury Committee requested further information from the banks regarding recent outages affecting customers.
Meg Hillier expressed concern that losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience for families living paycheck to paycheck.
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