Santander outage: "It's simply not good enough"

Another week, another outage. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks that given the number of these events their systems may have been targeted. The reality is no bank will admit their system has flaws, which could result in Northern Rock-style queues outside branches.

Frequent banking outages are totally unacceptable, especially given the vast resources banks have to invest in technology and cybersecurity. Customers rely on seamless access to their finances, and repeated failures erode trust. While banks face increasing cyber threats and the complexity of digital infrastructure, these should be anticipated and mitigated. Many outages stem from legacy systems struggling to keep pace with modern demands. Banks should prioritise robust, resilient tech infrastructure to prevent these disruptions. Customers deserve reliability, and ongoing failures suggest systemic issues that need urgent addressing, rather than just reactive fixes when things go wrong.

The recent spate of banking outages is becoming an unwelcome pattern for customers. Santander joins a growing list of banks whose systems have buckled, leaving customers locked out of their accounts. It's simply not good enough. Banks have colossal IT budgets and teams of specialists, yet basic services keep failing. The shift to digital banking wasn't a surprise - it's been happening for years, giving banks plenty of time to build robust systems. What's particularly frustrating is the lack of backup options. With branch networks shrinking away, when online services fail, customers are left completely stranded. Banks need to stop treating these as isolated incidents and address the fundamental reliability issues in their systems.

Outages at major banks are happening more and more often and consumers have every right to be fed up. Banks have significant resources and should be more resilient given the critical role they play in people's everyday lives.

803 hours and counting. That is how many hours of UK bank app disruptions clients have suffered since January 2023. Today was the turn of Santander’s bank app outage completely blocked mobile banking access for clients. It’s a minimum of 158 IT failure incidents at banks affecting millions of customers in this period. Reports cite login and payment issues, with Santander confirming mobile, phone, and card service failures. Creaking and ageing IT systems are clearly struggling with modern demands. Banks like Santander (parent firm spent €2.9B on tech in 2023) split funds across innovation, upkeep, and security, but outages often tie to internal glitches (e.g., server issues), not just malware but with 2023 profits of £1.5B in 2023, surely, they can and should do better. Customers need reliable access; Over 803 hours of chaos isn’t minor. This follows this morning’s news that Barclays has earmarked up to £12.5m in compensation payments to customers for inconvenience and distress.