Lloyds Bank and Halifax customers hit with app outage

Lloyds Banking Group has been rocked with another outage as thousands of customers report issues with their online services.

The financial services giant was flagged with a spike on the online outage tracker Downdetector at around 11:15am on Wednesday as users reported issues.

Across the group – which includes Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland – it serves around 26m customers in the UK.

A spokesperson for the banks said: ““We’re aware some customers are having issues with our app and online banking. We’re really sorry about this and we’re working hard to fix it.”

Multiple users on social media reported issues when trying to transfer money and also said they were unable to access online banking on their app or website.

One affected customer shared a notice on X from the Halifax app that said the bank was having “technical problems”. The user added it had left them “stranded” as they had “bills to pay now”.

It follows the firm being hit with a major tech blunder earlier this year as users logged on to see rogue transactions that did not belong to them. Customers reported seeing national insurance numbers and benefit payments that were not theirs.

Lloyds later confirmed this specific incident had affected up to 447,936 customers. The bank has made payouts of more than £200,000 in so-called “goodwill” payments.

A Treasury Committee report last March revealed nine of the UK’s biggest banks and building societies were down for over 803 hours – the equivalent of 33 days – over the last two years.

Barclays topped the list for most outages at 33, but had been able to reduce the length to 93 hours, shorter than some rivals.

HSBC was close behind Barclays with 32 incidents, but nearly double the amount of hours, shooting up to 176.