Barclays Bank has confirmed that its systems are working after a two-day outage which began on Friday 31 January.

During the outage, customers experienced problems with transfers, payments and some were unable to withdraw cash.

Others were locked out of their accounts or unable to access their funds.

The bank has apologised for the disruption, confirming that it was not due to a cyber-attack. However, it did not explain the reason why its systems were unavailable.

Additionally, Barclays warned its customers to be vigilant as fraudsters can take advantage of outages to send messages pretending to be from the bank to obtain sensitive personal information.

Friday 31 January was the deadline for self-assessment tax returns.

Barclays confirmed that it has spoken to HMRC and advised them of the issue.

The bank promised customers that they would not be charged the late penalty fee for their tax returns, as it isn’t applied until the beginning of March.

Martin Greenfield, chief executive of cybersecurity company Quod Orbis, said that the incident highlighted some of the vulnerabilities in banking infrastructure.

“With the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) now in full effect, this incident underscores why regulators are intensifying their focus on tech resilience,” he added. “Moving forwards, financial institutions need to consider how they can better integrate their operational resilience frameworks with broader risk management strategies, ensuring they both meet regulatory requirements and customer expectations for reliable services.”

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