AWS Outage Affects Major UK Banks — What To Do If You Missed Payments

A major cloud-service disruption at Amazon Web Services (AWS) knocked out key banking services for millions of UK customers on Monday morning. The incident struck around 8 a.m. UK time and left UK banks including Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland unable to process online banking or payments.

The root cause lies in DNS and database faults within AWS's US-based infrastructure. While many services have been restored, enquiries are ongoing about how and why the failure occurred — and crucially what affected bank customers should do now.

Several UK Banks Affected

Banks within the Lloyds Banking Group — notably Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland — reported outages linked to the AWS disruption.

Outage-tracking websites show millions of reports globally during the incident.

Customers reported being unable to open banking apps or access account data. Some payments simply could not be made and others were delayed as payment-flows relying on cloud services broke down.

What To Do If You Missed Payments

LAD Bible explains what bank users should do if they missed their payments because of the AWS outage. Below are some of the things you can do:

Call Your Bank Immediately

Contact your bank immediately. Explain the disruption and request they reverse any late-fees or consequences given the outage.

Contact Your Credit Provider

If the missed payment affects a credit agreement, reach out to the credit provider without delay. Ask for an amended mark or waiver of late-payment reporting.

Keep All Evidence of the Outage

Keep evidence of the outage's impact: screenshots of error-messages, timestamps of login failures, posts on outage-trackers showing the AWS incident. This strengthens any compensation claim.

Seek Assistance From FOS

If you suffer longer-term harm — for example a declined loan because a payment showed late — you may escalate to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) and argue the bank failed to protect you from a known service disruption.

UK Banks Now Back Online

According to Fin Extra, services at Lloyds Bank, Halifax and Bank of Scotland are now returning to normal. AWS meanwhile reports that the underlying fault has been fixed but that residual issues and back-logs may still be clearing.

Should Bank Users Worry?

The fault appears technical rather than malicious. AWS has said the disruption stemmed from DNS resolution issues affecting its DynamoDB database service in the US-EAST-1 region. Security firms report no indication of a cyber-attack or DNS hijack.

Nonetheless the incident highlights how reliant online banking and payment systems are on a single cloud provider and how a cascading failure in one region can affect the UK. Experts warn that firms should build redundancy, geographical distribution and alternative payment paths.

For customers: if you experienced disruption you should assume the bank is aware of the issue, but you should still take steps to document your case if you suffered financial loss.

The most attention will now turn to whether banks treat this as a normal outage (and handle compensation accordingly) or whether users are left to deal with consequences despite the failure lying outside their control.