9 of the UK’s largest banks accrued over 33 days of IT downtime during the last two years with hundreds of thousands of individuals affected.
Information obtained from banks by MPs on the Treasury Committee revealed at the very least 158 banking IT failures between January 2023 and February 2025, equating to over 800 hours of service unavailability..
Following the current three-day outage skilled by Barclays Financial institution clients, which started on payday on the finish of January, MPs demanded solutions from financial institution CEOs.
Chief executives at Barclays, Santander, NatWest, Danske Financial institution UK, Nationwide Constructing Society, Allied Irish Financial institution, HSBC, Financial institution of Eire and Lloyds Banking Group had been requested for info on the dimensions and influence of IT failures over the previous two years.
The information doesn’t embrace the current Barclays crash, however the financial institution did present MPs with particulars of the impact of the outage. It revealed that in the course of the three-day incident 56% of on-line funds failed attributable to “extreme degradation of mainframe processing efficiency,” based on the Treasury Committee. Barclays stated it would pay between £5m and £7.5m to clients on account of the outage and in complete Barclays might pay out as much as £12.5m in compensation attributable to outages over the 2 years in scope.
The banks instructed MPs that programs and inside software program malfunctions had been widespread causes for the IT failures.
Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Treasury Committee, stated for households “dwelling pay cheque to pay cheque” banking downtime is “a terrifying expertise”.
“The very fact there was sufficient outages to fill an entire month inside the final two years exhibits clients’ frustrations are fully legitimate. The truth is that this knowledge exhibits even probably the most profitable banks and constructing societies hit technical glitches. What’s crucial is that they react swiftly and guarantee clients are stored knowledgeable all through,” she added.
Final month, Hillier stated the closure of excessive road branches in favour of on-line banking means financial institution crashes hit clients more durable. “The quickly declining variety of excessive road financial institution branches makes the influence of IT outages much more painful; that’s why I’ve determined to jot down to a few of our largest banks and constructing societies.”
She thanked banks for his or her responses and was “reassured” they’re taking motion to minimise the influence of IT failures on clients.
Barclays Financial institution reported probably the most incidents, 33, with Allied Irish Financial institution, HSBC and Santander subsequent with 32 every. Nationwide Constructing Society reported 18 outages, NatWest 13 and Lloyds Financial institution 12. In single figures had been Allied Irish financial institution (9), Danske (5), and Financial institution of Eire (4).
NatWest reported probably the most downtime at 194 hours, adopted by HSBC with 176.
Simply final week an additional payday outage hit banks together with Lloyds Financial institution, Nationwide, TSB and Nationwide, based on outage monitoring organisation Downdetector.
One senior banking IT skilled stated that if a variety of banks expertise issues on the identical time, it factors to a relating issue. “If it’s plenty of banks, it makes me assume there’s a typical denominator, like they’re utilizing a provider or software program that’s shared by a number of banks, as a result of it could be coincidental for a number of of them to go down on the identical day,” he stated.
Additional pointing to a possible downside with exterior IT, the knowledgeable added that in his expertise, banks attempt to keep away from making IT modifications on the finish of the month. “Finish of the month is generally a time banks keep away from making modifications. For instance, financing departments contained in the banks don’t like the danger of chaos at an unprecedented finish of the month as a result of they’re doing month-end accounting and don’t need know-how issues.”
