RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers hit by fresh IT meltdown

07 March 2013 | 4839 views | 1 Natwest branch signage 2

RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers were left unable to withdraw cash from ATMs, make card payments or access Internet and phone banking for several hours last night, after another technical meltdown at the group.

Customers began reporting problems with accessing their money and accounts at around 10.00pm last night, prompting the majority state-owned banking giant to take to Twitter to confirm the issue and apologise:

We are aware of the problems our customers are having and apologise, we will provide more information as soon as we have it.
- NatWest Help (@NatWest_Help) March 6, 2013

By around 01.00am, the bank claimed to have fixed the problem, although this was disputed by some customers:

@natwest_help actually they're not - online banking is still down?
- Neil Ashurst (@neilashurst) March 7, 2013

The outage comes less than a year after a bungled software update at the banking group saw a huge payments backlog develop, causing chaos for RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank account holders.

Some NatWest and RBS accounts were not fixed for 10 days while Ulster was still affected weeks after the incident hit, forcing the bank to put aside £125 million to compensate customers.

Update:
RBS says the issue was caused by a "hardware fault unrelated to the issues experienced last summer and was much easier to fix".

Comments: (1)

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A Finextra member | 08 March, 2013, 03:04

But the failure is incompetent staff and management, not hardware.

The hardware fault is secondary to the primary problem ... This issue is very much related to the crash they suffered six months ago. Come on, customers were still complaining that services were offline, even though management said all was fine. This is proof enough that buffoonery is at play here.

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