The UK’s nine top banks and building societies have accumulated at least 803 hours of IT disruption in the past two years.
At least 158 banking IT failure incidents – which totalled over 33 days’ worth of disruption – impacted the ability for millions of customers to access and use services between January 2023 and February 2025, according to data published by the Treasury Committee on Thursday,
The figures are based on information collected from Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank.
The data published this week doesn’t include the most recent outage impacting Barclays at the end of January or the IT glitch which caused issues at Lloyds Bank, Halifax, and TSB last Friday.
Barclays did however provide the Treasury Committee with data which showed that 56 per cent of online payments during the recent incident failed due to “severe degradation” of its mainframe processing performance.
The bank revealed that it expects to pay between £5 million and £7.5 million in compensation to customers for ‘inconvenience or distress’.
The Committee said that when taking into account all of the information shared by Barclays, this means the bank could pay out up to £12.5 million in compensation due to outages.
The second highest amount paid out by a firm in the last two years is £350,000 by the Bank of Ireland.
Common reasons given for the IT failures include problems with third-party suppliers, disruption caused by a change in systems, and internal software malfunctions.
The publication of the data comes after the Treasury Select Committee wrote the chief executives of the UK’s top banks last month to ask for information on the scale and impact of IT failures impacting their businesses over the past two years.
“The fact there has been enough outages to fill a whole month within the last two years shows customers’ frustrations are completely valid,” said chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame Meg Hillier MP. “The reality is that this data shows even the most successful banks and building societies hit technical glitches.
“What’s critical is they react swiftly and ensure customers are kept informed throughout.”
Last week, customers at TSB, Lloyds Banking Group, and Halifax reported problems accessing their online banking services.
TSB customers took to social media to complain, with some saying that the incident was not the first time they had experienced issues like this at the bank.
The IT issues, which saw customers unable to login to the banks’ mobile apps and internet banking, coincided with payday, echoing a technical glitch at Barclays when customers were expecting their salary at the end of January.
The issues came exactly four weeks after Barclays’ multi-day outage saw customers experience problems with transfers, payments and withdrawing cash.
