Over 1.2 million UK customers were impacted by a widespread banking outage on February 28, according to a new House of Commons report. The disruption hit four major high street banks—Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide, and HSBC—on a critical payday for most UK workers, leaving many unable to access their monthly wages.
Lloyds was the hardest hit, with around 700,000 affected customers across its subsidiaries, including Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA. Despite the scale, Lloyds COO Ron van Kemenade rejected the term “outage,†arguing that most users could still access their accounts. Still, he acknowledged infrastructure upgrades were made to improve login systems and monitoring.
HSBC revealed that customer support was also severely impacted, with some waiting up to two hours to speak with a representative, compared to the typical five-minute wait. Other banks involved have similarly issued compensation and committed to improving their systems.
Importantly, none of the banks reported any fraud incidents related to the disruption. The Treasury Committee is continuing its investigation into the wider implications of such outages and has requested data from additional banks including Santander, NatWest, and Bank of Ireland.