In the UK, nine of the largest banks and building societies accumulated more than 803 hours of tech outages in the last two years, according to the figures published by a group of MPs. At least 158 banking IT failure incidents occurred and affected millions of customers’ ability to access and utilize online banking services between January 2023 and February 2025.
The report shows that Barclays could pay out a maximum of £12.5m in compensation because of the outages over the last two years. The recent Barclays outage lasted three days, from January 31 to February 2, 2025. During this Barclays Banking Outage incident, Barclays confirmed that over half of online payment attempts failed.
Barclays Banking Outage Compensation
Barclays has promised to pay out a maximum of £12.5 million in compensation after outages of its app as well as its website affected millions of customers. The IT failure was faced not only by Barclays but also by many banks in February of this year. All they found out was that their payment systems had gone down.
This added to the mayhem for several Barclays customers because they couldn’t access their bank accounts the month before. Barclays customers were unable to get access to their hard-earned cash and savings due to the banking app outage last weekend.
The Chief Executive of Barclays, Vim Maru, confirmed that the reason behind the January outage was a software problem with their system. The reason for the January 2025 outage incident was not a cyberattack or another malicious activity. We continue to work through the impact to make it clear that no customer or client will be out of pocket as a result of the incident.
Who is eligible for Barclays banking outage compensation?
The bank’s customers were calling for “compensation.” Down Detector, a website which allows consumers to report issues with apps, registered over 1,000 reports in the morning of March 8.
Customer complaints peaked at just around 9:30 am, with around 70% of customers revealing they were not able to transfer funds between accounts.
Individuals who were left out of pocket by the outages will be eligible for compensation. Barclays is currently working to find out all those who were affected prior to paying out to qualifying customers.
Barclays officials stated that we want to help customers by keeping them away from making a complaint by using internal data to see which account holders experienced problems. It is advised to customers to keep in touch with Barclays if they think that they are eligible for compensation.
How much do you get from Barclays banking outage compensation?
Last week, MPs commanded Barclays to deliver up to £12.5 million in compensation to those customers who were affected by tech outages in the past two years. Barclays replied to the Treasury Committee that it is going to deliver between £5 million and £7.5 million for a major banking outage that occurred in January of this year.
An additional £5 million is being reserved to cover other app and online banking issues occurring between January 2023 and December 2024. The exact amount that a qualifying individual can expect to receive will be based on the level of financial impact suffered. When the Money asked Barclays how many current account holders it has.
It stated that it has around 20 million personal customers but did not confirm how many of these hold current accounts in Barclays. If we assume all 20 million customers are current account holders, then it is expected that they will be able to receive a maximum of 63p each as compensation.
When and how can you get your Barclays banking outage compensation?
The exact Barclays banking outage compensation date is not announced by officials yet, but Barclays told MPs in a letter, “We have been taking a proactive approach to affected individual complaints since the incident happened and have dealt with as many of these as possible at the first point of contact into the bank.
And when we start the distribution process of compensation, we will prefer those customers with vulnerable characteristics or those who are in vulnerable circumstances.
They further explained that in some cases, we will deliver compensation automatically. On the other hand, we will contact qualifying customers to either provide additional details or confirm the action that we are taking.