Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers were locked out of online and mobile accounts in the latest blow for confidence in Britain’s online banking infrastructure
Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers were locked out of online and mobile accounts in the latest blow for confidence in Britain’s online banking infrastructure.
Users on Twitter began reporting issues in the early hours of Friday, saying they were unable to access the app or online banking services. However, the bank restored services shortly after 10am.
The bank did not disclose the cause of the glitch, but apologised for the problems.
The service failure came a day after some Barclays customers were left struggling to log into accounts for several hours due to a technical problem. The Co-operative bank and Cashplus have also had to apologise for online disruptions in recent days.
The latest lock-out prompted renewed criticism. Editor in chief of money.co.uk, Hannah Maundrell said banks really need to pull their socks up because this keeps happening again and again. It’s really not good enough when so many customers are being encouraged to bank online.
The latest banking problems follow TSB’s huge IT meltdown earlier this year, after a botched IT switch locked millions of customers out of accounts.
For RBS its outage this morning will raise painful memories of the worst-ever service failure by a British bank, when a software update in 2012 resulted in millions of customers locked out of their accounts, some for up to a month.
As the latest outage emerged, RBS issued a statement saying that it is aware that customers are currently experiencing issues logging into their online and mobile banking accounts. The bank said it would like to apologise for the inconvenience. It said customers can still use ATMs and telephone banking.
Angry customers took to Twitter, with one saying that NatWest app is down again which is not really acceptable for a 24-economy and raised trust issues.