Barclays Bank is staring down a brewing crisis as customers threaten a mass exodus following yet another technical outage on March 8, 2025. The latest failure locked users out of online banking and mobile app services, reigniting frustrations from a disruptive three-day blackout in late January that overlapped with the UK’s income tax deadline. Furious customers have taken to social media, branding Barclays the "worst bank ever" and pledging to ditch it for competitors, signaling a potential tipping point for the embattled lender.

The backlash on X paints a grim picture. "Another outage, another excuse," one user vented, pointing to a troubling pattern of weekend disruptions. Others slammed the bank’s communication, noting they learned of issues via social media rather than official channels. "Barclays doesn’t care about its customers—time to leave," another declared. The bank has attributed these incidents to software glitches in its UK mainframe system, not cyberattacks, and claimed the March 8 issue was fixed by Saturday afternoon. Yet, lingering customer skepticism suggests trust is eroding fast.

The financial stakes are mounting. A Treasury Committee probe into IT failures across UK banks pegged Barclays as a top offender, with over 33 days of unplanned outages since January 2023. This has triggered a compensation bill of up to £12.5 million—£5 million to £7.5 million for the January debacle, plus £5 million for prior incidents. Analysts warn that losing even a fraction of its 20 million UK customers could dwarf these costs, especially if small businesses, hit hard by payment delays, lead the charge out the door.

Strategically, Barclays is at a crossroads. On March 7, it inched closer to a £650 million deal with Brookfield Asset Management to offload a controlling stake in its UK payments business, starting with 10%. This follows its exit from European retail banking—selling its German consumer finance arm in February—and a £1.2 billion acquisition of Tesco’s banking operations in November 2024. With its stock at a five-year high, Barclays plans to return £10 billion to shareholders through 2026 via dividends and buybacks. But these bold moves hinge on operational stability, and the IT woes cast a long shadow.

Adding complexity, former CEO Jes Staley’s appeal against an FCA ban over his Jeffrey Epstein ties—heard on March 7-8—keeps Barclays in the reputational crosshairs. Chairman Nigel Higgins cited Staley’s dyslexia as a possible factor in the saga, though it’s unrelated to the outages. As customer patience wears thin, Barclays must urgently overhaul its tech infrastructure to stem the tide of defections—or risk seeing its ambitious reset unravel amid a self-inflicted exodus.