Barclays may be required to compensate customers up to £12.5 million (nearly $16 billion) due to technology outages experienced over the past two years. The UK’s second-largest bank disclosed this compensation estimate in a letter to MPs, following data published by the Treasury Committee. The committee’s report highlighted 33 days of unplanned tech and system outages across nine major UK banks and building societies within the last 2 years. These disruptions impacted customers’ access to banking services, prompting scrutiny and potential financial redress, according to reports. The Treasury Committee, a cross-party group, initiated inquiries with the UK chief executives of these banks to confirm the extent of the IT failures and the estimated compensation for affected customers. This investigation was prompted by a recent Barclays outage in January, which caused days of disruption for customers, notably coinciding with payday and the self-assessment tax return deadline. Barclays also informed the committee that the outage was due to a software issue within a segment of its UK mainframe operating system and was not for a cyber attack. Some of the commonly cited causes for these incidents include problems with third-party suppliers, disruptions from system changes, and internal software malfunctions.