Bank customers locked out of online accounts

RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank customers were locked out of their online bank accounts for five hours yesterday following an IT glitch.

The technical problem meant customers could not access online facilities during the morning. RBS traced the problem to a routine weekly firewall upgrade. It said in a statement: “We would like to apologise to customers who experienced issues logging into their online and mobile banking accounts this morning, this issue has now being resolved.”

CUSTOMERS of Natwest are the latest to be hit by online banking failures, prompting MPS to criticise banks for failing to protect customers from IT crashes.

Natwest and parent company Royal Bank of Scotland’s online banking services went down yesterday morning, less than 24 hours after rival Barclays’ systems went down for several hours. Natwest and RBS customers were unable to access their accounts between 5am and around 10.30am, when the bank said it had fixed the problems.

Nicky Morgan, chairman of the Treasury select committee, wrote to RBS and Barclays for an explanation. She said: “It simply isn’t good enough to expose customers to IT failures, including delays in paying bills and an inability to access their own money. High street banks justify the closure of their branch networks on the basis that they are providing a seamless online and mobile phone banking service. These justifications carry little weight if their banking apps and websites cannot be relied upon.”

Users of Natwest’s app encountered an error message stating it was “unable to establish a connection”, while the bank’s website message said online banking was “temporarily unavailable”.

Customers took to social media to complain.

One Twitter user wrote: “Just got paid and I can’t spend any money… Natwest app is down and my card is being declined.”

The issue was understood to have been caused by a firewall upgrade by RBS.

Following the string of recent outages City regulators at the Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority have demanded lenders improve their IT resilience.