Over 803 hours of unplanned tech and system outages were reported over the last two years in the nine top UK banks and building societies, research from Britain’s Treasury Committee has found.
With at least 158 banking IT failure incidents being reported between January 2023 and February 2025, this amounts to over 33 days of unplanned IT downtime, over a month in a two-year period where millions of customers where blocked from accessing their cash.
Among those banks hit were Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank, according to data gathered by Barclays. Barclays themselves reported 33 outages over the period with each glitch having severe impacts, their most recent resulting in the failure of 56 per cent of online payments and costing them up to 7.5 million pounds in customer compensation.
HSBC and Santander reported the second largest number of hits over the 24-month period, each reporting 32 glitches. Only a few weeks ago, HSBC faced a significant technical glitch during which more than 1,600 users reported issues with the HSBC website and mobile banking app, keeping customers offline and without access to their funds for hours until resolved.
Meg Hiller, Chair of Treasury Select Committee, commented: “For families living pay-check to pay-check, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying statement” but nonetheless felt ‘reassured’ banks were attempting to minimise their impact on customers where possible.
Richard Petrie, CTO at the London Internet Exchange (LINX)
Richard Petrie, CTO at the London Internet Exchange (LINX), said: “Maintaining uptime is critical for banks and financial institutions because they operate in real-time environments where every second counts. Live transactions, customer support systems and mobile or online banking platforms all rely on continuous availability to serve customers and maintain trust. A moment of downtime can significantly disrupt financial transactions, delay payments and create frustration for customers whose businesses depend on these services. Moreover, with the vast amounts of sensitive and confidential data financial institutions handle, any outage could risk data integrity and security, further compounding the impact. “
“Resilience and redundancy policies refer to the systems and protocols in place to ensure that services remain operational, even in the face of failure. Resilience involves the ability of a system to withstand disruptions and continue operating effectively, while redundancy means having backup systems or paths that can take over instantly if the primary ones fail. For financial institutions, this might include using multiple data centres, network connections, or infrastructure providers to ensure there’s no single point of failure. Together, these strategies help institutions maintain continuity of service, reduce downtime risk, and improve customer confidence.”
“Many financial institutions are not yet fully leveraging dual network fabrics or taking advantage of infrastructure solutions such as the London Internet Exchange (LINX) and other Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). While there are examples of dual connectivity being used to support resilience and redundancy—such as utilising multiple networks within the same city—this approach remains relatively uncommon across the sector. A significant number of institutions continue to rely primarily on direct cloud connectivity. While this can deliver strong performance, it may also introduce risk during an outage if no secondary or failover network is in place. This presents a clear opportunity to highlight the advantages of dual fabric architectures in enhancing network reliability and maintaining service continuity during critical incidents.”
