A major outage suffered by UK high street banks on the last Friday of February affected more than 1.2m customers, according to a recently released House of Commons report.
Editorial
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The incident, which took place on February 28, coincided with the pay day for the majority of workers in the UK, leaving many without their monthly wages.
The outrage affected four high street banks – Lloyds, TSB, Nationwide and HSBC – and letters from those banks sent to the chair of the Commons Treasury Committee, Dame Meg Hillier, have been reported on by the BBC.
According to the correspondence, the banks have started to pay compensation to the affected parties and also looked to upgrade their own systems and processes.
The letters show that Lloyds was the worst affected bank with 700,00 customers of Lloyds and its subsidiaries Halifax, Bank of Scotland and MBNA impacted by the outage.
However, Lloyds COO Ron van Kemenade disputed the use of the term ‘outage’ to describe the incident, arguing that the majority of customers were unaffected and able to log in to their accounts.
Nevertheless, Van Kemenade said the bank had subsequently impoved its log-in infrastructure and monitoring systems.
It was not just the inability to access monthly wages that impacted banking customers on February 28 – there were also long queues for those looking to contact their banks’ support services.
HSBC disclosed that its customers had to wait an average of two hours to contact a member of the support team, a significant increase on the standard wait time of five minutes.
The banks also stated that there is no indication that any customers were victims of fraud during the outages.
The Treasury Committee has been investigating the impact of banking outages on customers and has looked at other incidents that have taken place in recent months and asked the aforementioned banks, plus Santander, NatWest, Danske Bank, Bank of Ireland and Allied Irish Bank to submit relevant data.
