Barclays to pay millions in compensation for IT outages: Here’s what UK’s second largest bank has to say

Barclays may be required to compensate customers up to £12.5 million (nearly $16 million) due to technology outages experienced over the past two years. The UK’s second-largest bank disclosed this compensation estimate in a letter to MPs, following data published by the Treasury Committee. The committee's report highlighted 33 days of unplanned tech and system outages across nine major UK banks and building societies within the last two years. These disruptions impacted customers' access to banking services, prompting scrutiny and potential financial redress, according to reports.
According to a report by The Independent, the Treasury Committee, a cross-party group, initiated inquiries with the UK chief executives of these banks to confirm the extent of the IT failures and the estimated compensation for affected customers. This investigation was prompted by a recent Barclays outage in January, which caused days of disruption for customers, notably coinciding with payday and the self-assessment tax return deadline. During this incident, Barclays highconfirmed that over half of online payment attempts failed, underscoring the severity of the disruption.

As per the report, the bank is expecting to pay between £5 million (nearly $6.4 million) and £7.5 million (nearly $9.5 million) in compensation for the latest outage. Moreover, the bank is also estimates paying £5 million for other incidents that occurred between January 2023 and December 2024.
In a letter published by the Treasury Committee (seen by The Independent), Barclays UK CEO Vim Maru wrote: “We acknowledge that through no fault of their own, some of our customers and clients may have suffered loss or distress and inconvenience.”
Barclays also informed the committee that the outage was due to a software issue within a segment of its UK mainframe operating system and was not for a cyber attack.
Estimates indicate that across nine banks and building societies, at least 158 IT failure incidents occurred between January 2023 and February 2025, the report added.
However, this number does not include Barclays’ recent outage or the recent disruptions to other banks’ online services. Some of the commonly cited causes for these incidents include problems with third-party suppliers, disruptions from system changes, and internal software malfunctions.