A major outage affecting UK high street banks on the last Friday of February impacted over 1.2 million customers, as outlined in a recent House of Commons report.
The incident occurred on February 28, coinciding with pay day for many workers in the UK, leaving numerous individuals without their monthly wages. The outage involved four banks: Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide, and HSBC. BBC reports indicate that correspondence from these banks was sent to Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the Commons Treasury Committee.
The banks have begun compensating affected customers and are working to upgrade their systems and processes. Notably, Lloyds was the hardest hit, with 700,000 customers, including those of its subsidiaries Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA, impacted by the outage. However, Lloyds COO Ron van Kemenade challenged the characterization of the incident as an “outage,” stating that most customers were able to log in to their accounts without issues. He added that improvements to the bank’s log-in infrastructure and monitoring systems have been implemented since the incident.
The February 28 incident also resulted in long wait times for customers needing support, with HSBC revealing that customers faced an average wait of two hours to reach support, compared to the usual five-minute wait. Fortunately, the banks reported no indications of fraud connected to the outages.
The Treasury Committee is investigating the effects of banking outages on customers and is examining recent incidents while requesting relevant data from the impacted banks, as well as Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland, and Allied Irish Bank.