Over 1.2 million people in the UK were affected by the pay day banking outages of four major banking groups that occurred in February.

The scale of the outages was revealed in a series of letters from the banks that were sent to Commons Treasury Committee Chair, Dame Meg Hillier, from Lloyds, HSBC, TSB, and Nationwide, concerning the outages that took place on 28 February.

The letters revealed further details, such as the scale of interruptions from each banking group, and other ways the outages impacted customers.

For instance, HSBC customers had to wait on average two hours for support from the bank’s customer service team, while HSBC’s target wait time is just five minutes.

It was revealed that Lloyds banking customers were hardest hit, with 700,000 people from Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA saying they could not access their accounts on the first log in attempt.

The banking group claimed that this did not mean the bank suffered an ‘outage’ as five million customers successfully logged in during the ‘outage’ period.

About a quarter of a million TSB customers, 196,255 Nationwide customers, and 60,000 from HSBC faced disruptions in accessing their accounts on the Friday.

So far, the banks have collectively paid £114,000 in compensation to affected customers, with Nationwide paying the bulk (£84,341).

Recommended reading

• Outages Reported Across Major Digital Banking Platforms
• Payday Mayday: Thousands of Mobile Banking Outages Hit Major Banks
• Why Are So Many Bank IT Outages Happening?

The letters also said that the banks found no evidence that outages happened more during pay days, or any increase in fraud during the outages.

The February pay day outage was not the only time banking outages have caused major disruptions to UK customers.

The treasury committee of the House of Commons found 158 incidents of IT failure in banks between January 2023 and February 2025, which did not even include the pay day outage.

Together, bank and building society outages had accumulated to 803 hours – about 33 days – in that two year time period.