Barclays suffered a ‘software issue’ and not a cyber attack when its systems went down in January, its chief executive told MPs today.
Speaking to the Treasury Select Committee this morning, Barclays boss Vim Maru apologised to customers for the IT outage on 31 January.
Barclays customers experienced three days of outages, meaning they were unable to make essential transactions, including mortgage payments.
The bank previously told the Committee that it expected to pay between £5million and £7.5million to customers in compensation.
Maru told MPs that the issue was ‘not a cyber or malicious act’ and that the bank had looked into whether the issue had been because of underinvestment or because it was pay day.
IT outage: Barclays boss told MPs the IT outage was caused by a software issue
‘We don’t find any correlation between those things,’ he said.Â
‘A software issue was the root cause. We’ve worked with a third-party provider that provides us with that software.Â
‘We’ve learned the lessons around that, we’ve put a fix in place that means we won’t have a recurrence.
‘Looking forward, there’s a further enhancement that we’re making that’s in the middle of implementation.’
Maru said the bank had invested ‘many, many tens of millions of pounds to make sure that our systems are in the right place’ and that its incident levels have been dropping.
It comes just weeks after M&S, Co-op and Harrods faced large-scale cyber attacks which froze critical systems.
HSBC boss Ian Stuart told the Committee that cybersecurity ‘does keep me awake [at night]’ and ‘is now very much top of the agenda’ as the bank invests ‘hundreds of millions’.
‘We could be attacked, and we’re being attacked all the time. So the defence mechanisms are critical.Â
‘The amount of money we’re all spending on our systems is absolutely enormous … it has to because our customers rely on our systems.’
Data collected by the Treasury Committee shows that Britain’s top nine banks and building societies accumulated the equivalent of more than 33 days of unplanned outages in the past two years.
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