UK bank outage payments issue hits Lloyds, Barclays and Monzo customers

A UK bank outage payments issue disrupted online transfers for customers of Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, Halifax and Monzo on Monday, with reports rising around midday, according to Downdetector. The operational impact centred on delayed or uncertain payments, including a risk that customers could send the same transfer more than once.

Downdetector showed hundreds of reports from HSBC, Halifax and Monzo customers, while Lloyds and Barclays customers also reported difficulty making online payments. Some users said they were also unable to access banking apps and websites.

The disruption affected a core function for retail banking customers: sending money online. For households and businesses, uncertainty over whether a transfer has failed or is still processing can complicate bill payments, payroll-related transfers and time-sensitive account movements.

What happened to UK bank payments?

Lloyds said in a social media reply that it was investigating a problem affecting Faster Payments and that the issue could cause delays. The bank advised customers who had already submitted a payment to check whether it had been completed before trying again, to avoid duplicate payments.

Faster Payments was the system Lloyds identified as affected. In practical terms for customers, the bank’s warning meant that an apparent failure message did not necessarily prove that a transfer had not been processed.

One Lloyds customer posting on Downdetector warned that messages saying payments had failed could be misleading, saying the transfers were in fact going through. That account was not independently verified, but it was consistent with Lloyds’ public advice not to repeat a payment before checking its status.

Monzo also acknowledged a transfer problem in a customer statement. The digital bank apologised for the inconvenience, said it was aware of a temporary issue affecting transfers and said it was working on a fix.

Which banks were affected?

Customer reports named Lloyds, Barclays, HSBC, Halifax and Monzo. Downdetector is a public outage-reporting service that tracks user-submitted complaints, so its figures indicate the scale of reported disruption rather than confirmed transaction failures at each institution.

• Lloyds customers reported online payment problems, and the bank said Faster Payments delays were under investigation.
• Barclays customers were among those reporting difficulty making online payments.
• HSBC, Halifax and Monzo customers submitted hundreds of reports to Downdetector around midday.
• Some customers also reported problems using bank apps and websites.

No cause for the disruption was identified in the statements reported by Lloyds and Monzo. The available statements also did not give a timetable for full restoration of transfers.

For customers, the clearest instruction came from Lloyds: do not resend a payment until checking whether the original transaction has gone through. That advice is aimed at limiting duplicate transfers when a payment message, account display or app status is unreliable during an outage.

This story draws on original reporting from Finextra Research.