Bank outages and IT failures

A bank outage may occur when a bank or building society has problems with its IT system.

Outages may disrupt customers’ online and mobile banking and prevent payments from going through.

If you’ve lost out because of a problem with your bank’s IT system, we may be able to help if, for example, the IT outage meant that:

• your wages were paid into your account late, and your bank charged you for going overdrawn
• you missed making a payment to someone else – like your credit-card company, landlord or mortgage provider – who then charged you
• a payment to your savings account was delayed and you lost interest on your savings
• as a small business, you couldn’t take or make payments because of disruption to your business account, and so lost out on trade
• you had to pay extra costs to sort out problems caused by the bank outage – for example, for phone calls or travel, or legal bills to resolve issues caused by the disruption, such as a delay in buying a house.

Sometimes we hear from people who were scammed by fraudsters who used the bank outage to trick them into sharing their bank details. For example, they may pretend to be calling from your bank and offering to help.

If something like this has happened to your, read more about how we can help with complaints about fraud and scams.

Our service is free and easy to use. 

1. Before bringing your complaint to us, you should talk to your bank or building society and tell them:

• • what happened to you because of the IT problems
  • what you want them to do to put things right, and
  • what losses you want them to cover. 

You may find it useful to show them financial statements, bills and receipts for any extra costs you’ve had to pay, and emails that show how the situation was affecting you. If you’re still unhappy, make a complaint.

2. If your complaint is about a card payment or direct debit, the business must look into things and get back to you within 15 days – either with a response to your complaint, or to explain why they can’t yet give you a response. They then have to send you a response within 35 days.

   If your complaint doesn’t involve a payment from your account, the business has eight weeks to respond.

   Either way, if you’re not happy with the response – or they don’t reply in time – you can bring your complaint to us.

3. Our complaint checker will tell you more about some of the things we need to know to get started and help you make sure you’re ready to send us your complaint.
4. Fill in our online complaint form. Your case will be assigned to a case handler who will get in touch when they start to investigate.
5. To help us consider a complaint fairly, we may ask you for more information later on.

Use our complaint checker

We’ll assess what happened using evidence from you, the financial business and any relevant third parties. We'll also consider:  

• the relevant law, and any regulations and industry codes of conduct that applied at the time 
• how you were affected by the outage, IT failure or technical error
• whether the bank contacted you to offer support – particularly if you were vulnerable
• what the bank did to try to put things right.

Once we’ve investigated, we'll tell you whether we believe you've been treated unfairly or not. And we’ll explain how we reached our decision. 

If we think your bank has done something wrong or treated you unfairly, we’ll ask them to put things right. This could be by telling them to:

• correct a credit file
• refund any extra costs you had to pay as a result of the IT outage.

We may also tell them to pay you compensation for any distress or inconvenience you have experienced.

What to expect