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Join Which? MoneyBanking IT outages: find out how often your bank has gone down
Creaking computer systems, third-party failures and cyberattacks have repeatedly knocked out Britain's banks
Josh is an award-nominated journalist with nearly a decade of experience, including writing for national newspapers. A data whizz, he specialises in covering personal finance and investing.
Thousands of Lloyds Banking Group customers were left unable to make payments in June due to an IT glitch. The bank blamed the issue on a software defect introduced during an update of its banking app.
This was just the latest in a string of IT meltdowns that have plagued the UK’s banking industry for years. They can affect thousands or even millions of customers at once.
In our June survey, a quarter of UK adults who have a current or savings account said they had been impacted by a banking IT outage within the past five years.
Many told us of instances where they were unable to access their accounts and – in extreme cases – couldn’t make payments either digitally or in person using a debit or credit card.
‘My standing order to my dad’s residential care home failed, and the bank transfer from his bank card also failed online,’ one respondent told us.
Here, we explore which banks have the worst track record, what’s being done to prevent future meltdowns, and what you can do to protect yourself.
What's behind bank outages?
Last year, the Treasury Committee wrote to bosses at nine of the largest banks and building societies to demand an explanation for repeated IT failures.
In their written responses, the banks were quick to blame a combination of third-party suppliers, disruption caused by a change in systems, and internal software malfunctions.
According to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), third-party failures accounted for 19% of cyberincidents reported between 1 January and 9 July 2026. This is where a regulated firm has outsourced some of its technical processes to an external firm that has itself experienced a technical failure.
Many companies now rely on the same cloud providers, meaning a single fault can ripple across hundreds of services. In 2024, the American tech firm CrowdStrike experienced a problem with an antivirus software update, causing a global IT outage that affected several major UK banks.
Creaking legacy IT systems, particularly at the older banks, is another risk factor.
Laura Catterick is the director of resilience and cyber at UK Finance, the trade association for the UK banking sector, and has worked for some of the leading banks in the UK, including HSBC and Lloyds.
She told us that most of the banks in the UK are massive and highly complex organisations.
'They have hundreds if not thousands of systems, and they do thousands of updates every year to make sure their systems are patched up. But sometimes that does cause bugs and outages.
‘A lot of the bigger, more complex banks have been around for a long time, and have formed through lots of different mergers,’ she explained.
‘They’re trying to consolidate and upgrade their systems, but inadvertently may cause an outage.’
- Find out more: What to do if your banking app goes down
Which banks have the most IT outages?
The Treasury Committee’s 2025 report found that nine of the top banks and building societies operating in the UK accumulated the equivalent of 33 days of unplanned systems outages in the previous two years.
Of the banks that responded to the Committee’s call for evidence, NatWest’s outages lasted longest. It had 13 outages between January 2023 and January 2025, with the effects felt for a total of 194 hours (eight days).
NatWest said it has ‘dramatically reduced the number of IT incidents impacting our customers and the time taken to resolve them – with our most important business services available 99.9% of the time last year.’
Barclays experienced the most outages (33) during the same period, and 15 of these impacted customers for a total of 93 hours.
Since 2018, all banks have been required to report major operational and security incidents that affect current-account usage to the FCA. In 2025, the watchdog received 963 incident reports from all regulated firms (down from 1,044 in 2024).
Based on our analysis of bank data collated by the FCA, we’ve compared IT outages across 21 of the UK’s leading banks and building societies between April 2025 and March 2026.
Total incidents reported between April 2025 - March 2026
Santander and its digital arm Cahoot had the most outages during this period, with a total of 38 incidents reported to the FCA.
Santander told us: 'Since April 2025, our services have been available to retail customers 99.96% of the time, and not all incidents have impacted our retail customers’ ability to access their banking services. Of those that have, since 2018, the average time to resolve the issue has been less than three hours.
'We continue to invest in our technology infrastructure to ensure we are providing the best possible service to our customers. Where incidents have occurred, our priority is to restore services as quickly as possible, keeping customers informed throughout, and providing appropriate support.'
Santander and Cahoot were followed by Lloyds Bank with 22 reported incidents, and Bank of Scotland and Halifax with 20.
Looking purely at incidents that affected internet banking, Cahoot and Santander once again experienced the most (17), followed by Barclays (12).
The 10 challenger banks we had data for reported a total of 60 incidents between them. However, the 10 high street banks and Nationwide building society racked up more than double that, with a total of 144 outages.
Of the banks we contacted directly, only HSBC provided us with additional figures stretching back to 2021. These showed a decline in outages each year, dropping from 13 in 2021 to four in 2025.
- Find out more: The 5 biggest banking security threats and how to avoid them
What are banks doing to prevent outages?
According to Catterick, banks have been working closely with the Bank of England (BoE), the FCA and UK Finance to reduce the number of incidents.
‘UK Finance has been bringing the banks together to talk about and share best practice. They’ve been really focusing on upgrading their systems to remove outdated software and build up resilience.’
She also said that the BoE regularly puts retail banks through ‘stress tests’ to check how robust their systems are: ‘I think it’s been paying off as I’ve definitely seen a reduction in outages over the course of my career.’
But what about third-party failures?
UK Finance told us the biggest change it wants to see is more vendors being designated as ‘critical third parties’ (CTPs).
Under the Financial Services and Markets Act, the government can designate key technology and service providers that are critical to the financial sector as CTPs. Regulators can make rules for, gather information from and take enforcement action against any of these firms.
In July 2026, four major global cloud services and technology providers were designated as CTPs.
This means that the BoE, the FCA and the Prudential Regulation Authority will jointly oversee the critical services they provide to the financial sector, helping to reduce the risk of widespread disruption and strengthening collaboration across the financial services ecosystem.
- Find out more: How safe is online banking?
How to protect yourself
The scale of IT issues at banks isn’t something you can control, but there are things you can do to minimise their impact on you.
Our survey found that 58% of people with a current account had either just a single account, or all their current accounts with one provider. Having another account with a different provider – with some money in it – gives you options in case of an IT failure.
A credit card is another option; just make sure you pay off the entire balance each month to avoid incurring interest.
It’s also a good idea to keep some physical cash to hand for emergencies. According to cashpoint provider Link, around 77% of shops still accept cash, so at least you should be able to buy some emergency groceries and petrol when your bank goes down.
Registering for various modes of banking, including mobile, telephone and online, also gives you more options if one system goes down.
Can you get compensation?
Nobody should be left out of pocket or suffer a dented credit score because of a banking glitch. You may be entitled to a payout, depending on the extent to which the disruption negatively affected you.
- Banks do sometimes pay compensation in the event of a failure, so it’s worth getting in touch when you’re affected by an outage. If your provider doesn’t put things right, gather evidence and make a formal complaint.
- Include any statements displaying late-payment fees, copies of any relevant emails, or a copy of your credit report if your score was affected.
- If this still doesn’t work, your next step should be to lodge a complaint with the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), which will investigate and decide whether you’re entitled to any redress.
- If you’re unhappy with what the FOS decides, and you’ve exhausted its internal review processes, you could consider a civil claim. Make sure you obtain competent legal advice first, though.
In June 2026, we surveyed 2,055 members of the public; 861 had a current account, 129 had a savings account, and 988 had both. Figures are representative of the UK population aged 18+
