Yes, this has been submitted to HN before, and hasn't gained any traction.
But this isn't the first time something like this has happened, and simultaneous outages like this are not something that is likely to happen by chance. This report is only part of the visible problem; this is happening to other banks as well on a regular basis (see below).
If it's not chance, either external attacks have occurred against several different banking groups at once (Lloyds, TSB, Halifax and BoS are all one group, but Halifax, Nationwide, First Direct and Barclays are not), or a substantial fraction of the entire British banking industry has a single point of failure somewhere.
Whichever it is, the banks and their regulators are keeping very quiet about it.
The traction I'm looking for is discussion of this issue by technically knowledgeable people. Something is happening here which potentially affects the majority of the population of the UK, and the tech community by and large seem to be ignoring it.
Banking is critical national infrastructure. If online banking were to stop working for any considereable time, the result would be economic chaos, and right now the online banking services of most of the major banks are going down regularly, and concurrently, to the point where the mainstream media are reporting it.
Outages like this should be incredibly rare, and certainly not both frequent and concurrent across the big-nine banks.
It's all happening in plain sight, but outside of some trade press reports, no-one seems to be discussing it within the tech community. DDoS? Nation-state level hacking? Wide-area data centre or telecoms network failures? Repeated failure of some unacknowledged single point of failure? Or something else?
It's clear that even the Treasury Committee don't know, or they wouldn't be sending these letters to the banks' management.
Whatever it is, the banks seem to be keeping it a secret, and security-through-obscurity is generally a very bad idea. I understand keeping problems secret for short periods to allow fixes, but this has now been going on for months. Something is very wrong.
Unless this is all chance, and IT reliability and/or security is falling apart across the entire British banking sector independently, which seems increasingly unlikely, something is going on. But what?
But this isn't the first time something like this has happened, and simultaneous outages like this are not something that is likely to happen by chance. This report is only part of the visible problem; this is happening to other banks as well on a regular basis (see below).
If it's not chance, either external attacks have occurred against several different banking groups at once (Lloyds, TSB, Halifax and BoS are all one group, but Halifax, Nationwide, First Direct and Barclays are not), or a substantial fraction of the entire British banking industry has a single point of failure somewhere.
Whichever it is, the banks and their regulators are keeping very quiet about it.
More reporting:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/28/payday_from_hell_as_s...
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/lloyds-bank-down-not-work...