Liv McMahon
Technology reporter
Banking apps have once again been hit by IT issues on payday in the UK.
Lloyds Bank and Halifax apps went down on Friday morning, according to thousands of user reports to platform outage monitor Downdetector.
Users also reported technical issues affecting access to the TSB and Bank of Scotland apps.
The number of reports flagging problems with the apps has since declined.
A Lloyds Banking Group spokesperson has told the BBC that the Lloyds, Halifax and Bank of Scotland apps and online banking services are now working as normal.
The British banking giant apologised for the issues in an earlier statement.
It is the second time in 2025 that banking apps users have encountered problems on payday, after a Barclays app outage affected UK customers in January.
Which? retail editor Reena Sewraz said the IT problems “could cause real headaches for thousands of customers”.
“Some people may miss important bill payments, find themselves unable to pay for essential services or risk going overdrawn, all of which could have serious consequences,” she said.
One user told the Lloyd’s Bank social media account on X that they could not access their business account to pay their staff.
Another said in a post tagging Lloyds Bank’s X account they had been told to transfer funds into their account, but could not due to the issues affecting its app.
“Your new cards have no phone numbers on and I’m nowhere near a branch,” they wrote – adding “help!”.
Barclays customers told the BBC last month that their bank’s outage, lasting several days for some, left them unable to purchase essentials or make vital transactions.
“I could cry. I changed to you when Barclays had a major breakdown on payday,” one X user told Lloyds in a reply to one of their posts on Friday.
“Now this month you’ve gone down on payday,” they added.
The Treasury Committee recently wrote to the bosses of nine banks asking for information about the scale and impact of IT failures on customers.
The latest bank IT problems highlight concerns about a shift towards mobile and internet banking services impeding peoples’ access to physical cash and bank branches.
Martin Quinn, the director of campaign group Campaign for Cash, said Friday’s banking app issues demonstrated society’s over-reliance on technology.
“This proves that now more than ever a strong bank branch network [is needed], as when outages happen, we need face-to-face banking,” he told the BBC.
Disability rights groups are also calling for access to physical cash to be protected.
Meanwhile, Patrick Burgess, a cyber-security expert with the Chartered Institute for IT, said the Lloyds issues on Friday showed “how fragile parts of the legacy banking system still are”.
High street banks still rely on “outdated infrastructure” that may face extra strain in moments of high demand, such the month-end, he added.
Professor Markos Zachariadis, chair of financial technology at the University of Manchester, told the BBC that if financial institutions cannot keep pace with demand or deal with technical issues, “the economy will suffer many times at a high cost”.
It may also add to pressures on consumer trust in traditional banks, says Shilpa Doreswamy of GFT Technologies.
“It is becoming imperative for incumbent banks to urgently modernise their IT infrastructure or continue to face an accelerating loss of confidence – and maybe customers too,” she told the BBC.
