Bank IT outages of over 800 hours in 2 years

The responses from the 9 banks that were the subject of a Treasury Committee request for information on IT outages over the past 2 years show that, between January 2023 and February 2025 (not including the Barclays incident between 31 January – 2 February or the incident that affected multiple banks on 28 February):

• there were at least 158 incidents
• the outages totalled at least 803 hours – or 33 days
• reasons for the incidents included problems with third-party suppliers, disruptions caused by a change in systems and internal software malfunctions.

In relation to the latest Barclays incident, it provided separate information that suggested 56% of online payments failed and that it expects to pay out between £5-7.5m in compensation – which will bring the total compensation it may end up paying out for all outages to a possible £12.5m.

The Treasury Committee commented that the data shows that even the most successful institutions have technical glitches which can damage customers – and so it is critical that the institutions react quickly to incidents and ensure customers are kept up to date.