Bank clients combating a whole bunch of hours of IT glitches, Treasury committee report finds

Bank customers are suffering from hundreds of hours of IT glitches, a report by MPs on ‘panic’ caused by tech issues says.

Nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies suffered more than 33 days of tech and system power cuts in two years, according to data published by the treasury committee.

The report comes as Barclays faces a compensation bill of up to £12.5million for a disaster when an outage led to days of disruption at the end of January. It coincided with payday for many workers and the deadline for self-assessment tax returns, with more than half of attempts to make an online payment failing.

The report by MPs found at least 158 IT failures at the nine businesses between January 2023 and February 2025. That does not include Barclays’ recent woes.

Meg Hillier, chairman of the committee, said: ‘Losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience.

‘Even when rectified relatively quickly, it can cause real panic. The fact there have been enough outages to fill a whole month shows customers’ frustrations are completely valid.’

Glitches: Nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies suffered more than 33 days of tech and system power cuts in two years