Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland restore online banking after widespread outage
Lloyds Banking Group says its services have been restored after thousands of customers reported problems accessing online banking across its three major brands: Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland.
A spokesperson for the UK's largest retail and commercial banking provider confirmed the recovery on Wednesday afternoon, stating: "All our services are back up and running."
"We are sorry for the inconvenience caused, and if customers are still experiencing any issues, please leave it a few minutes and try again," the spokesperson added.
According to online outage tracker Downdetector, users began reporting access issues around 11:15 BST, with complaints spiking rapidly across all three banking apps. The disruption left many customers unable to make payments, check balances or access mobile banking features.
In response to a customer reporting they could not access their account, Halifax posted on X: "Some customers are having issues with accessing our Mobile App right now. Bear with us as we fix this."
One Lloyds customer said on social media that the app went down as she tried to send money to someone. Another said they were locked out of both the app and the website. Inside the Lloyds app, users encountered a 503 error message, signaling a server that was not ready to handle requests.
The outage is the latest in a series of IT failures to hit Lloyds Banking Group. In March of this year, nearly half a million customers were affected when a glitch exposed other users' transaction data, including names, account numbers and balances, across the Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland apps. That incident prompted the bank to issue apologies and offered affected customers compensation.
Wednesday's disruption also comes months after a separate pay-day banking outage hit 1.2 million people across multiple UK banks, raising fresh questions about the resilience of digital banking infrastructure as customers increasingly rely on mobile and online services.
Lloyds Banking Group has 26 million customers overall. While the bank stressed that the latest issue was a technical problem rather than a security incident, the recurrence of such failures underscores the growing pressure on financial institutions to maintain flawless digital service—especially on busy banking days or during payroll periods.
Customers who continue to experience issues are advised to wait a few minutes before retrying, or to contact the bank directly if problems persist. Lloyds has not yet disclosed the root cause of the failure.
— Additional reporting by Downdetector and social media monitoring
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