UK banks suffer 803 hours of IT outages—blame ageing legacy systems

By Puja Sharma

Financial services leaders re-strategise operational management as nine UK top banks and building societies accumulate at least 803 hours of downtime over two years

In the wake of recent large-scale IT outages, financial services leaders are reassessing their technology strategy and reviewing increasing IT budgets for AI solutions. According to PagerDuty’s 2025 State of Digital Operations report, four in ten (38%) financial services firms believe that GenAI can improve operational efficiency as they look to improve their IT service performance.

The frequent IT outages across UK banks, including the recent high-profile disruptions at Barclays, stem from a mix of ageing legacy systems, rising cyber threats, and the increasing complexity of digital banking infrastructure. Many financial institutions still rely on outdated core banking technology, making them vulnerable to crashes and prolonged service disruptions. Additionally, surging digital transaction volumes and cyberattacks put further strain on IT systems, leading to unexpected failures. Barclays, for instance, faced major outages due to system maintenance issues and technical glitches, leaving thousands of customers locked out of their accounts. These incidents highlight the urgent need for AI-driven predictive maintenance and stronger digital resilience strategies across the financial sector.

This is in context of a report published by the UK Treasury Committee, highlighting that nine of the top UK banks and building societies experienced the equivalent of more than 33 days of unplanned tech and systems outages in the last two years.

Tackling outage concerns in the financial sector

PagerDuty’s research shows that to help safeguard digital resilience, over eight in ten (84%) financial services leaders see agentic AI within digital operations as either a core or peripheral capacity over the next one to two years.

Alongside boosting resilience, financial services leaders consider AI key to providing higher quality data insights (45%), improved customer experiences (33%), and better team collaboration (35%).

Tackling outage concerns in the banking and FinTech sector coincides with similar wider industry trends. Across business sectors, six in ten (64%) respondents say they have increased IT operational budgets in 2025, supporting continued investments in operational efficiency, resilience, and excellence.

FS firms are playing catch up with AI

While AI is a focus for industry leaders looking to fortify their digital operations, the financial services sector lags in adoption behind other business sectors. Tech firms lead the way, with 80% expanding GenAI budgets and 75% increasing agentic AI investments in the next year. 

Financial services firms also highlighted barriers to AI implementation, with 35% citing data security concerns, 28% stating challenges around securing budget and determining ROI, and 26% identifying challenges around developing the right skills.

Eduardo Crespo, VP EMEA, PagerDuty, said, “Financial services firms have learned painful lessons from ongoing and repeated widescale IT outages. Not only have the economic costs of incidents stacked up in the last year, but also customers are willing to churn if they cannot have real-time online transaction and account access. Failure to deliver 24/7 service damages regulatory obligations and customer trust.

“With challenges to service delivery underscored by the Treasury Committee’s numbers, we’re seeing an acceleration in how financial service leaders restructure their technology architecture and embed resilient incidence management capabilities coupled with AI. The application of AI to detect and diagnose disruptive events is a concrete use case that warns firms before outages occur, allowing predictive and preventive maintenance or softening the impact of unplanned events.

“The majority (84%) of financial services leaders see the value of deploying agentic AI to manage their IT operations to forge greater resilience and safeguard businesses from major IT failure.”