Barclays faces probe from Treasury Select Committee into six-hour outage
Barclays faces an investigation from the Treasury Select Committee after it yesterday became the latest lender to experience a major systems failure.
Millions of customers were unable to access online banking, telephone banking, as well as branch services for as long as six hours.
The Treasury Select Committee is likely to ask the bank similar questions as those faced by payments firm Visa, banking services firm Cashplus, and high street challenger bank TSB, City PM understands.
Previous committee probes have also dragged company bosses in front of MPs in Parliament. Barclays Bank UK is led by Ashok Vaswani, who reports to Jes Staley, the chief executive of the parent company.
The scrutiny of the committee can prove damaging: TSB chief executive Paul Pester stepped down in the aftermath of the crisis, although outages in that case lasted weeks, rather than hours.
Problems at Barclays began yesterday morning at 10:44 and lasted until after 4pm, the bank said. The affected services were unavailable for all users.
The cause of the outage is “currently under investigation”, the bank said. Regulators at the Financial Conduct Authority were informed during the day.
A Barclays spokesperson said: “We’re very sorry about the technical problems our customers have experienced today. Everything is now back up and running, and we’re really grateful for customers bearing with us.”