Natwest, Barclays, HSBC lead months worth of online banking outages
Nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies were down for over 803 hours – the equivalent of 33 days – over the last two years.
Fresh data from the Treasury Committee shows a minimum of 158 IT failure incidents at banks had affected millions of consumers in the period between January 2023 and February 2025.
Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Dame Meg Hillier MP, said the latest data reiterates customers’ frustrations as “completely valid”.
However, since the collection of this data, Brits have been burdened with two more payday banking crises.
Barclays had plummeted offline at the end of January, and all of Lloyds Banking Group apps went down the following month.
Barclays confirmed to the Treasury Committee that following its outages, which lasted from January 31 to February 2, the bank would pay between £5m and £7.5m in compensation to customers for “inconvenience or distress.”
A total of 56 per cent of online payments had failed at the lender during the period due to ‘severe degradation’.
The Treasury stated that the FTSE 100 giant could pay out as much as £12.5m following the outages due to additional information it had seen from Barclays.
Natwest tops duration of incidents
Barclays topped the list for most outages at 33, but compared to some of its rivals, it had been able to reduce the length to 93 hours.
HSBC was shortly behind Barclays with 32 incidents, but nearly double the amount of hours shooting up to 176.
Meanwhile, Natwest who had less than half as many outages as HSBC and Barclays with 13, led the pack for length of time offline at 194 hours.
The Treasury said the common reasons cited for the IT failures were third-party suppliers, disruption caused by a change in systems and internal software malfunctions.
Hillier added: “For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience.
“Even when rectified relatively quickly, it can cause real panic, which is why we wanted to get a proper understanding of why unplanned banking outages happen and how banks and building societies respond.”
The spur of outages comes during a time of mass profitability for the banks.
The UK’s biggest lenders, Barclays, HSBC, Natwest, Lloyds and Standard Chartered, booked an all-time high collective profit of £50.3bn in 2024 and returned £35bn to investors.
The FTSE 350 bank index has also climbed nearly 20 per cent since the beginning of the year.