UK Parliament's Treasury Committee publishes data showing 803 hours of unplanned IT outages at nine major UK banks and building societies

The UK Parliament’s Treasury Committee has published new data drawn from correspondence with nine major UK banks and building societies on unplanned technology and systems outages. The aggregated figures show at least 803 hours of disruption over the past two years, with at least 158 IT failure incidents affecting millions of customers’ ability to access and use banking services between January 2023 and February 2025. The correspondence covers Barclays UK, HSBC UK, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide Building Society, Santander UK, NatWest Group, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland UK and Allied Irish Banks Group (UK), with common causes cited including problems with third-party suppliers, disruption caused by system changes and internal software malfunctions. While the aggregated data excludes more recent outages affecting Barclays customers between 31 January and 2 February and various banks on 28 February, Barclays provided information on its multi-day incident, including that 56% of online payments failed due to severe degradation of mainframe processing performance; it expects to pay GBP 5 million to GBP 7.5 million in compensation for customer inconvenience or distress, with total potential compensation across outages up to GBP 12.5 million compared with the next highest reported payout of GBP 350,000 by Bank of Ireland. The Committee indicated it will request further information from the organisations involved in the excluded recent incidents.