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Another day, another banking outage – why are our systems breaking down?

Every few weeks we hear this story again: a major bank, an institution that millions of people rely on, can’t be relied upon

Banking outage
Image credit: William Barton / Shutterstock

Barclays went down from January 31st to February 2nd because of a problem in a ‘critical module of our UK mainframe’, locking people out of their accounts on the day of deadline for self-assessment tax returns.

TSB, Nationwide, First Direct and Lloyds all experience significant problems, with customers were unable to access their accounts on payday.

HSBC customers experienced an outage on mid-February, leaving customers unable to make simple online transactions. NatWest Royal Bank of Scotland and Ulster Bank all have planned outages for their Open Banking services.

Every few weeks we hear this story again: a major bank, an institution that millions of people rely on, can’t be relied upon. Take payments companies and the wider world of financial services into account and it’s more like once a day....