A Santander online banking outage left thousands of customers unable to access their accounts on Wednesday, with problems hitting both the website and mobile app from around mid-morning. The website has since been restored, but the mobile app remained affected as the bank worked to resolve the issue.
Santander UK is one of the UK’s largest retail banks, holding around £184 billion in customer deposits alongside its mortgage and other products, according to Yahoo Finance. Disruption on that scale can affect a great many people very quickly.
When did the Santander online banking outage begin?
According to Down Detector, a website that tracks service disruptions in real time, problems began at around 11.30am. Frustrated customers took to social media in large numbers to report being locked out of their accounts, unable to log in through either the app or the browser-based service.
Santander UK confirmed the problems in a statement: ‘We’re aware that customers are currently experiencing difficulties accessing some of our banking services. We’re very sorry for the inconvenience this is causing and we’re working hard to fix it as soon as possible.’
The scale of potential disruption is considerable. Santander UK said it had 13.6 million active customers in the UK in 2025, down slightly on the previous year, meaning even a short outage affects a very large number of people who rely on digital access to manage their money day to day.
A pattern of banking app problems across the high street
Santander is not the first high street lender to face this kind of trouble recently. Customers of rival Lloyds Banking Group were locked out of mobile banking apps twice in just over a week last month, underlining how dependent millions of people have become on apps and websites for basic banking tasks that were once handled in branches.
The outage comes at a busy time for Santander UK, which is owned by Spanish lender Banco Santander. The bank completed its £2.65 billion acquisition of TSB in May and is now working through the complex process of integrating the two organisations.
Under new boss Mahesh Aditya, the UK bank pledged in July not to close any more branches across its network or that of recently acquired TSB before 2028. That commitment covers 305 Santander branches and 175 TSB branches across the UK for nearly another 18 months at least.
The pledge carries extra weight given what came just before it. At the start of the year, Santander UK announced another wave of branch closures, with 44 sites earmarked for closure and 291 jobs put at risk. The July commitment draws a line under further reductions for now, even as the bank presses ahead with the TSB integration.
For customers locked out on Wednesday, the more immediate concern was simply getting back into their accounts. Santander said the website service had been restored and the bank was continuing to work on a full fix for the mobile app. Anyone who needs to make an urgent payment or access their account in the meantime can visit a branch or call the bank directly.
