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