Barclays announces new £7.5million compensation payout to customers hit by three-day outage

Barclays is set to pay up to £7.5million in compensation to customers after its banking app went down for three days last month.

The outage – which impacted millions of the high street bank’s customers – caused almost half (56%) of its online payments to fail between Friday, January 31, and Sunday, February 2, due to a mainframe systems failure. The high street bank said in a letter to the Treasury select committee – which on Thursday published the findings of a probe into the largest UK banks’ IT outages in the wake of the Barclays incident – that it expected to pay between £5million and £7.5million to customers affected.

According to data collected by the committee, the country’s nine banks and building societies accumulated more than 33 days of unplanned tech and systems outages over the past two years. It also found that at least 158 IT failure incidents had taken place between January 2023 and February 2025.

The three-day outage caused turmoil in January as not only did it fall on payday for millions of Brits, but it also coincided with HMRC’s self-assessment deadlines, causing many Barclays customers to submit their tax returns late.

The probe found the UK bank had already paid nearly £5million in damages as it suffered 33 outages over the past two years, excluding the most recent incident. This is the highest number of all the banks that had been assessed. This means Barclays could end up paying a total of £12.5million in compensation owing to outages that have taken place since January 2023. It has not been confirmed how Barclays intends to distribute the compensation payments or how much each banking customer would receive.

HSBC suffered 32 outages in that period, the second-highest number, and paid customers more than £200,000 in compensation. NatWest was hit by 13 incidents lasting a total of 194 hours, the largest amount of time, leading the bank to pay out nearly £350,000 to consumers in redress.

Treasury select committee chair Dame Meg Hillier, said: “For families and individuals living pay cheque to pay cheque, losing access to banking services on payday can be a terrifying experience. The fact there has been enough outages to fill a whole month within the last two years shows customers’ frustrations are completely valid.”

Barclays UK chief executive Vim Maru said in a letter to the committee that the bank’s management was “deeply sorry for the impact this incident has had on our customers who were not able to access some of our services during the incident period”. He added that Barclays’ “priority and focus was to act quickly with our customers’ interests always front of mind” while the bank had proactively communicated with customers within the first two hours of the incident, which it flagged to regulators.

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