About 1.2 million people in the UK have been affected by bank disruptions on paydays earlier this year.

Details appeared in letters from Lloyds, TSB, National and HSBC to Dame Meg Hillier, chair of the House of Commons Finance Committee, which is studying the events that took place on Friday, February 28.

HSBC also revealed that customers have to wait an average of two hours to reach their online customer service team. Its standard target waiting time is five minutes.

The bank said in the letter that they had paid compensation to affected customers and outlined things they were trying to prevent similar issues in the future.

Lloyds Banking Group customers face the biggest impact of the disruption in February.

Ron Van Kemenade, the bank group's chief operating officer, said about 700,000 people were Lloyds, Halifax, Bank of Scotland and MNNA customers because they were unable to try to log in to their accounts for the first time.

However, Mr. Van Kemenade believes this does not constitute a power outage, as there were 5 million successful logins during the outage.

Nevertheless, the bank said it is improving its login infrastructure and surveillance systems after the incident.

A letter from the bank showed about 250,000 TSB customers, 196,255 customers from across the country, and 60,000 HSBC's customers also faced interruptions that morning.

So far, banks have paid customers more than £114,000 in compensation, with the highest payment fees nationwide (£84,341).

All banks say there is no evidence that fraudulent activity has increased during the interruption, nor is there any indication that interruptions are more common at some times (such as paid days) than in other periods.

The power outage on the payment day is far from the only IT problem encountered by the banking industry.

In March, nine major banks and construction societies operating in the UK have accumulated at least 803 hours (equivalent to 33 days).

The Finance Committee has been investigating the impact of banking, forcing Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds, National, Santander, Natvester, Dansk Bank, Bank of Ireland and Bank of Ireland to provide data.

The report also said Barclays can now face a £12.5 million compensation payment after a power outage on January payday.

The recent disruption revealed the bank’s aging of infrastructure and IT systems failure, said Shilpa Doreswamy, director of the Chartered Institute, and a GFT dedicated to digital transformation of the financial sector.