Barclays’ £7.5 million bill joins growing list of bank IT issues
Customers were locked out of services for more than 33 days in past 2 years
Barclays Plc’s recent outage was just the latest in a series of issues in banking technology, with customers of major U.K. lenders locked out of services for over 33 days over the past two years, lawmakers have found.
The Barclays incident alone will result in customers getting as much as £7.5 million ($9.7 million) in compensation, the firm wrote to the Treasury Select Committee. Nine banks including HSBC Holdings Plc, Lloyds Banking Group Plc and Banco Santander SA had at least 800 hours of IT system failures during 158 incidents between January 2023 and February 2025, the committee said Thursday.
“For families and individuals living paycheck to paycheck, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience,” Meg Hillier, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, said in a statement. “The fact there has been enough outages to fill a whole month within the last two years shows customers’ frustrations are completely valid.”
Problems with third-party suppliers, disruptions caused by system upgrades and internal software malfunctions were some of the reasons for IT outages that banks provided in written responses to the MPs. Other banks and building societies that responded were Nationwide, NatWest Group Plc, Danske Bank A/S, Bank of Ireland Group Plc and Allied Irish Banks Plc.
Barclays blamed mainframe infrastructure issues for knocking out many core banking services for several days from late January. During the outage, Barclays advised customers experiencing difficulties to seek support from friends and family and to contact food banks. Regulators have been in close contact with the bank over the issues.
David Raw, the managing director of operational resilience at industry body U.K. Finance, said the banking industry invests billions in systems and technology, which means incidents causing significant disruption “happen very rarely.”
“Unfortunately there are occasions when some services are unavailable and we recognize this can cause inconvenience for customers,” Raw said.
IT problems can result in costly penalties from U.K. regulators. In 2022, the Financial Conduct Authority fined TSB nearly £49 million for risk management and governance failures after a botched platform upgrade in 2018 resulted in several months of disruption.
