Pay day banking outages hit 1.2m people, banks reveal

About 1.2m radical successful the UK were affected by banking outages that happened connected what was wage time for galore earlier this year.

The details person emerged successful letters from Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC to Dame Meg Hillier, the seat of the Commons Treasury Committee, which is looking into the incident which occurred connected Friday, 28 February.

HSBC besides revealed that customers had to hold 2 hours connected mean that time to scope its online lawsuit work squad - its modular people hold clip is 5 minutes.

In their correspondence, the banks said they had paid compensation to affected customers and besides outlined what they were doing to effort to forestall akin problems successful the future.

Lloyds Banking Group customers faced the biggest interaction from the February outages.

Ron van Kemenade, the bank's radical main operating officer, said astir 700,000 radical who are customers of Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and MBNA were affected arsenic they couldn't log into their accounts connected a archetypal attempt.

However Mr van Kemenade argued it did not magnitude to an outage, arsenic determination were 5 cardinal palmy logins during the play of disruption.

Nonetheless, the slope said it was improving its log-in infrastructure and monitoring systems pursuing the incident.

The letters from the banks revealed astir 250,000 TSB customers, 196,255 from Nationwide and 60,000 from HSBC besides faced disruption connected that morning.

The banks person each paid retired implicit £114,000 successful compensation to customers truthful far, with Nationwide (£84,341) paying the most.

All the banks said determination was nary grounds of an summation successful fraudulent enactment during the disruption, and said determination was besides nary denotation that outages were much prevalent astatine immoderate times - specified arsenic wage days - than astatine different periods.

The wage time outage was acold from the lone IT occupation the banking assemblage has experienced.

In March, it emerged that 9 large banks and gathering societies operating successful the UK accumulated astatine slightest 803 hours - the equivalent of 33 days - of tech outages successful the past 2 years.

The Treasury Committee - which has been investigating the interaction of banking IT failures - compelled Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, Nationwide, Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank to supply the data.

The study besides said Barclays could present look compensation payments of £12.5m pursuing an outage determination that affected customers on wage time successful January.

Experts including Patrick Burgess of BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, and Shilpa Doreswamy, a manager with GFT, a institution committed to the integer translation of the fiscal sector, person stated that the caller outages uncover the problems banks person with ageing infrastructure and failing IT systems.