Pay Day Banking Outages Hit 1.2m People, Banks Reveal

About 1.2m group successful nan UK were affected by banking outages that happened connected what was salary time for galore earlier this year.

The specifications person emerged successful letters from Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC to Dame Meg Hillier, nan chair of nan 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 customer work squad - its modular target hold clip is 5 minutes.

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

Lloyds Banking Group customers faced nan biggest effect from nan February outages.

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

However Mr van Kemenade based on it did not magnitude to an outage, arsenic location were 5 cardinal successful logins during nan play of disruption.

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

The letters from nan 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 complete £114,000 successful compensation to customers truthful far, pinch Nationwide (£84,341) paying nan most.

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

The salary time outage was acold from nan only IT problem nan banking assemblage has experienced.

In March, it emerged that 9 awesome banks and building societies operating successful nan UK accumulated astatine slightest 803 hours - nan balanced of 33 days - of tech outages successful nan past 2 years.

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

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

Experts including Patrick Burgess of BCS, nan Chartered Institute for IT, and Shilpa Doreswamy, a head pinch GFT, a institution committed to nan integer translator of nan financial sector, person stated that nan caller outages uncover nan problems banks person pinch ageing infrastructure and failing IT systems.